Mindful Tools for Stress Management (self -study)
2. week: How to make clear observations?
Last week you've learned the basic skills of being mindful. This week we deepen the skills and learn how to observe our experiences as they are - without judgement.
- We get our direct experiences through our senses: what we can see, hear, smell, taste or sense.
- In our mind we have different kind of simulated experiences: our opinions, judgements, evaluations, analyses, mental images, memories etc.
We can be aware both of our direct and simulated experiences. However, we easily mix them up and through mindfulness practices we can learn to observe more clearly. When doing mindfulness practices you notice both your direct experiences, e.g. bodily sensations of breathing, numbness or sleepiness, and your simulated experiences, e.g. thoughts that pop into your mind like "I don't like this practice" or "should I have a cup of coffee after the practice." You learn to observe your experience more clearly: uncomfortable bodily sensations leads you to make the judgement "I don't like the practice."
When we are stressed we often get even more stressed because of our simulated experiences e.g. stressful thoughts like "I will miss the deadline and fail the project", "Everyone else is better at this task", "I'm not going to pass the exam" and so on. Being more aware of our thoughts helps us to relate to our own thoughts in a different way - we don't have to get stuck into them. With practicing mindfulness we get more freedom to choose how we react to our experiences - both direct ones and simulated ones.
This week we'll continue with the daily practices we learned last week:
- listening me
- body scan
- a mindful routine
In addition we have one new practice:
- Anchoring to breathing (audio)