Hello! I’m a resident in counseling who’s been lurking around on Lemmy for a while and I want to use this lovely community to both uplift myself and others. I had a period of time in graduate school where I was able to maintain daily meditation sessions, but with the stress of entering the workforce a lot of my good habits fell by the wayside.
It’s time to fix that.
For my first exercise today I spent some time this afternoon in my yard listening to birdsong - I could hear 5 different birds, even though I’m not sure what species they were other than whippoorwills and cardinals! I love feeling like these cute little guys are my neighbors, maybe I should put out some seed for them.
How do you use mindfulness in your own life? Would this community be interested in daily mindfulness check-ins? How else can we uphold each other as a community?
My mindfulness practice has recently sort of fallen to the wayside. I try to meditate twice a day but as I’ve been struggling with psychosis/paranoia, I find a lot of the time that I sit to meditate instead ends up being spent ruminating. I’m trying to gradually get back into it though, making more of an effort each session to spend more of the time actually meditating vs caught up in worried thoughts.
Something I used to do that I think could be useful to start up again was “slow mornings”, basically I’m very much internet/computer addicted so what I would do sometimes is when I wake up, rather than checking my PC, avoid all technology for as long as I could. It was usually just a few hours, but being unable to check my PC or my phone during that time meant I spent the time doing other things like meditation, exercise, reading, or just sitting and enjoying the silence. I found it had a massively positive effect on my mental health when I was doing it. Maybe this is my cue to restart it.