Are you tempted to look at mindfulness because of its incredible benefits? Perhaps you’ve tried it in the past but are feeling stuck.
Mindfulness effectively addresses depression, anxiety, stress, and chronic discomfort. It’s promoted as a method to improve your focus performance, sleep quality, relationships, and physical well-being. According to the experts, you can practice mindfulness and feel more content, satisfaction, contentment, and inner peace. You’ll also extend the duration that you live.
Three issues are likely to pop up when you’re on your own with your thoughts.
1. Your emotional habits
If you pursue mindfulness, your ego and other emotions will be happy to follow. Whatever troubles you in your daily life will always be present when you practice mindfulness. This could include one or more of the following emotions:
Perfectionism
Try too hard
The fear that your mind won’t let you relax
Try to fulfill the external requirements of a guide or teacher
Please do your best to quit because it’s too difficult
Resistance
Spanning out, checking out
Unrest
Since emotional patterns are powerful, you can easily blend them with how you respond. If, for instance, you tend to push to do too much, you’ll be immersed in the task without thinking twice. You may not realize what’s happening until it’s been played out over months or weeks.
If you are aware of this trap before it happens, it is possible to use mindfulness to recognize when a negative pattern occurs so that you can put it down. Instead of following the voice in your brain, practicing mindfulness offers you the opportunity to make a decision.
If you don’t react in your typical manner, over and over again, you slowly increase the ability to avoid doing the same thing each time. In the end, as you repeat your actions of awareness rather than reacting, these habits of emotionality become less effective.
Long-standing wisdom has been confirmed through neuroscience and neural plasticity in the brain.
Solutions: It’s okay to carry your habits with you. It’s hard not to. Utilize mindfulness meditation to understand your mental behavior (without even thinking about them). One by one, change them.
2. Resistance
It is possible to feel euphoric at the beginning of mindfulness training but then be stumbling after a couple of weeks on the road.
There are many reasons it’s best to avoid sitting for long periods. Cleaning the toilet is much more attractive than sitting alone.
It may be nothing to worry about. But, it can open the possibility of being missed again. Then, it happens again.
If resistance is apparent, then gently push yourself to continue. However, don’t push yourself too hard, or you could create more resistance.
Even if it’s one week or a month, it’s just a matter of getting back.
Another method to overcome resistance is to establish achievable goals before starting.
Make it a point to practice three times per week if each day is too difficult.
Start with five minutes if 20 minutes seem like a lifetime.
Solution: The likelihood is that you’ll encounter resistance at times during your journey of mindfulness. Don’t worry if it happens. Find the perfect balance between disciplined discipline and a lax attitude that keeps you from attaining any level of concentration.
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3. A plethora of thoughts
When people begin to practice mindfulness, they can feel overwhelmed by the number of thoughts popping up within their heads.
Do not be frightened If this occurs to you. It’s an ordinary thing to happen when you’re staring at your thoughts for what could it be your first experience. According to a study in 2020 released in Nature Communications, the average person can think of more than 6,000 thoughts one day.
The goal of meditation isn’t just to be unrestrained or oblivious to thoughts. It’s instead to be aware of the ideas you are experiencing, your emotions, or any feelings you experience.
However, the practice of simply watching without interfering with thoughts naturally calms the mind over time. That’s the reason why practicing mindfulness, called “Shamatha” in Sanskrit, is “peacefully resting” as well as “calm at peace.”
While it may seem like a challenge initially, with what appears to be an endless stream of thoughts, your mind will slow down when you repeat.
Solutions: It’s normal to be overwhelmed by thoughts as you begin to work on mindfulness. The time needed to settle your mind varies for each person. However, you can be sure that your mind will be fixed by practicing.
