Make Mindfulness A Priority

As a Personal Trainer, Group Fitness Instructor and Nutrition Educator my primary mission is to focus on your fitness. Are you meeting you fitness goals? How many burpees can you do in a minute? Have you implemented healthy lifestyle practices? In 2021, I want to shift the focus just a little to the left and ask you to add a Mindfulness practice to your daily agenda. What is mindfulness? I’m glad you asked.

“Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where you are and what you’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around you. It’s a quality that you already possess, it’s not something you have to conjure up, you just have to learn how to access it.”

Mindfulness can easily be inserted into your daily routinse through seated, walking, standing and moving meditation. Inserting short pauses into everyday life; and merging a meditation practice with other activities is mindfulness. When you’re mindful, you reduce stress, enhance performance, gain insight and awareness through observing your own mind, and increase your attention to others’ well-being. It’s a time when you can suspend judgment and approach your practice with warmth and kindness—to yourself and others. Follow these steps to began your practice:

Take your seat. Whatever you’re sitting on find a spot that gives you a stable, solid seat, not perching or hanging back.

Notice what your legs are doing. If you’re on a cushion on the floor, cross your legs comfortably in front of you. If you’re on a chair, it’s good if the bottoms of your feet are touching the floor.

Straighten—but don’t stiffen— your upper body. The spine has natural curvature. Let it be there. Your head and shoulders can comfortably rest on top of your vertebrae.

Situate your upper arms parallel to your upper body. Then let your hands drop onto the tops of your legs. With your upper arms at your sides, your hands will land in the right spot.

Drop your chin a little and let your gaze fall gently downward. You may let your eyelids lower. You can simply let what appears before your eyes be there without focusing on it.

Be there for a few moments. Relax. Now get up and go about your day. And if

the next thing on the agenda is doing some mindfulness practice by paying attention to your breath or the sensations in your body, you’ve started off on the right foot—and hands and arms and everything else.

That’s it. That’s the practice. It’s often been said that it’s very simple, but it’s not necessarily easy. The work is to just keep doing it.