Hello everyone this is Dr.
Tia H.
Ho with Finding Mindful Now guiding you out of your head and into your life with applied mindfulness.
Finding Mindful Now is about starting with a mindfulness practice and then seeing the capacity for us to tune in and be present with life more of the time,
Whatever we're up to.
Today we're talking about looking underneath your thinking and an invitation to arrive into this practice or this exploration.
I'm just going to invite you to take the longest inhalation and exhalation of your day.
We'll do two of them and then when you exhale it's going to include an audible sigh if that feels good to you.
This is an invitation if you'd like to focus on something else,
A different sense other than breathing such as looking outside a window or feeling the texture of the clothing on your skin you can do that instead.
So I'm just going to take two of the longest inhalation and exhalations of the day.
I'm going to start with an inhale and I'm going to slowly exhale with sound.
I'll do the second one and then exhale slowly and when we slow our exhalations down like this,
Especially when we use sound whether it's humming or even just an audible sigh,
That stimulates our vagal nerve and that vagus nerve basically sends a signal to the brain to bring the parasympathetic nervous system back online a bit and turn the stress system,
What I call the stress system,
The sympathetic nervous system down a notch.
So in mindfulness we're using our attention to notice our moment-to-moment lived experience,
To be with it rather than being yanked around by our changing thinking.
And in that breathing activity right there we dove into the experience,
The full presence of simply breathing.
And this helps us see that we have the capacity to tune in and be present with life,
Kind of whatever's going on.
Too often we get caught up in our thoughts and our attention gets lost in the stream of thinking,
Even when we're out on something like a health promoting hike or a long walk.
And luckily for us presence is always here underneath that thinking,
Waiting to be rediscovered.
So when you next notice your thinking today,
When you next notice that your mind,
The thoughts are in circles or your attention is pressed up against the window of whatever the topic is,
This is actually your aware self gently reminding you that you can take a pause.
You can take another couple of deep breaths and bring that attention right back into this moment.
If you're out on a hike and you find yourself stomping as your mind hammers out thoughts,
You can explore intentionally lifting and placing your feet,
Slowing your steps down.
If you're at work and you find your chest is tight,
You can bring attention to that body,
To that chest.
And then as you take those deep breaths,
Imagine feeling into your lungs.
You can close your eyes if you want to and just really feeling the full expansion of your chest.
And it's okay if your chatty mind continues to swirl a bit.
It's just what it does.
It's just doing its best to do its job.
So when you lift the lid on all this mind chatter,
Your aware self is underneath,
Fueled by the steady beat of life moving through this body,
This form.
The brain body is innocently sending thoughts into that aware self all the time.
Is this important?
How about this?
What about that?
The brain doesn't know always,
It's just creating associations,
Creating predictions based on your prior experiences,
Your current situational environment,
And all of the sensory inputs that are coming in from your body and from the outside world based on the theory of constructed emotion.
And your awareness is always in the background.
It's what all of those thoughts arise inside of.
It's underneath your conceptual thinking.
So mindfulness helps you tune into your forgotten innate wisdom that's life energy inside.
To me this feels like natural stability beneath the shifting and constantly changing mind.
So I just invite you to take a couple minutes during your day to take those couple of breaths again and come back to noticing where that awareness is underneath your thinking.
