Welcome to Day 3 of my 21 Day Mindfulness inspirations where I choose a word each week to write about and for us to focus and meditate on.
Don't forget if you would like to enjoy these mindfulness inspirations audibly, I have them recorded on my Beautiful Minds NZ podcastÂ
and on our Mia Belle New Zealand You Tube channel.Â
Mindfulness is simple but can be challenging to implement. So I'm grateful to be able to share some do-able tools to support your journey. I'm happy you've decided to take a few minutes for yourself, remind yourself that the world can wait, and that investing time into your well-being is so important. Let's find a comfortable sitting position where you are and take some deep conscious breaths with me. Counting to 4 as your breathe in. Hold for 2, then counting to 4 as you exhale.
Coming Home to Ourselves: Embracing Mindfulness
In the fast-paced world we live in, the idea of "coming home to ourselves" can feel elusive. We're constantly bombarded with information, demands, and distractions that pull us away from our inner peace and self-awareness. However, mindfulness offers a path to reconnect with our true selves, grounding us in the present moment and fostering a sense of inner calm. I invite you to explore with me how mindfulness can help us come home to ourselves daily and provide practical steps to integrate it into our lives.
I dedicated one of our perfume oils 'Coming Home' to this experience of mine of coming home to myself. To be given tools on how to cultivate this for me was life changing. I'd spent a good part of my life not being truly connected to my body and myself. I describe it as living life in a fragmented way and you don't quite know yourself. Parts of myself were even shut down and felt numb. This can be trauma related or you have lived and allowed yourself to be pulled in all sorts of different directions, in both your mind, feelings and body. Regardless of our experience - daily life and navigating our life experiences and journeys can be busy and demanding. A practice of coming home to ourselves on a daily basis, is a beautiful mindfulness practice that we can gift our bodies and well-being.
We can do this with some simple acts that don't require a lot of time. Although you may begin to enjoy it so much, you might decide to put more time into it. Which is all up to you!
Breathing - Taking those slow and deep diaphragmatic conscious breaths. This helps us to anchor ourselves in our body and in the moment. This also immediately helps our brain waves switch to the relaxed delta waves. Doing this for a few minutes is such a treat for your body. When your lungs and diaphragm fill up, observe the feeling of life and that oxygen filling your body with energy.
Body scan - Bring your attention and focus to different areas of the body, perhaps beginning from the top of the head and slowly doing a body scan down to your feet. You can say each body part as you scan which helps to bring your attention to it. You can also choose to just bring awareness to one particular body part like the hands or notice parts of your body that feel tense or have pain and send some healing and love to those areas.
Noticing - Using your 5 senses to engage in the moment. Sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste (which we can do while eating). Our products are wonderful to use to incorporate mindfulness through your senses in your day. Sight, touch, and smell. Our botanical perfume oil blends help to bring calmness, relaxation, peace or a refreshing reviving feeling into your moment. Just spend time simply observing, allowing and accepting the moment as is without judging it or yourself.
I encourage you to spend some time sitting and doing nothing at times. If you find this hard to do, do it in minutes at a time and increase it working your way up to perhaps 10 - 20 minutes. You can look around and notice during this time or if you want to practice meditating. Focus on something in front of you with a soft gaze. Then begin your conscious breathing exercise. Followed by a body scan. Practice helps it become a regular habit.
Let's do a short visualisation exercise on coming home to ourselves. Let's get into a comfortable position. Let's take 3 deep conscious breaths together. Deep breath in .... 2 ....... 3..... 4 and hold...... then exhale ..... 2 ..... 3 ..... 4. Repeat this 2 more times. You can close your eyes for this exercise if it helps you visualize better, otherwise you can keep your eyes open and apply a soft gaze towards something in front of you. Sometimes lighting a candle can help so you can focus your gaze on this.
Hopefully you feel more settled and present after doing these deep breaths. I'd like you to get a real sense of your body, focus your awareness on it. Imagine the outside perimeters of your body. Even imagine a light tracing the outside of your body. I'd like you to now say slowly and firmly. I am all here, and I am present. You can even place your hand on your heart as you say this. Let's repeat this a couple of times. I'd like you to imagine all parts of yourself coming home into your body. Imagine these parts as like a jigsaw puzzle, that are all coming back to you, flying in ever so gently from all around you. Imagine these parts all coming back together and fitting and firmly becoming whole and becoming one. This could be your thoughts, your feelings, your energy, your true self, your self worth, your assertiveness, a feeling of safety, of being whole. Perhaps these parts of you even have colour. What colours are they? This is you, this is your body, this is your home. As these pieces come back imagine the feeling of being put together, secure, solid, protected, recharged and being filled up, with the feeling of wholeness. What does the feeling of wholeness feel like to you? Sit with this and relax in this feeling and even receive it. What colour is it? Imagine that colour filling you up and it is bringing healing into your body and dissipating any pain, illness, discomfort or disease in your body. Allow this to flow right from the top of your head down to your feet and allow it to ground you and anchor you in your body. The weight of the awareness of coming home to yourself going right down to your feet and anchoring you to the ground. Take some deep breaths here with me and just relax. Stay here and enjoy this moment for a little longer even after we finish this mindfulness meditation and visualization for this week.
Remember if you prefer an audio version of this, these episodes are live within the same day of these blogs posts being live on my Beautiful minds NZ podcast or You Tube channel.
I look forward to sharing another mindfulness inspiration with you again next week!
Cath xoxox
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