If You Want To Live More Mindfully, Start With These 16 Simple Tips
1. Slow down and just breathe. Focus on the task at hand, not the future or the present. Breathe into the ‘now’.
2. Enjoy small pleasures. Like going for a walk outside, or even sitting down at your desk drinking a coffee.
3. Focus on your accomplishments. Not your perceived short-comings or failures. We have a choice in how we see things.
4. Take time for yourself. To fill up your own cup. We often live our lives ‘half full’ because we refuse to give ourselves the space and time we need to rest.
5. Meditate. You don’t have to sit in silence. You can sit and listen to music, read a good book, or journal. This quiet time will pool over into your life.
6. Let go of control for the future. Set an intention, take inspired action, then let go of the outcome knowing that you are whole and complete either way.
7. Live authentically. Effortlessly, intentionally, purposefully yourself. Not a version that someone else wants you to be.
8. Listen and observe more. We are always thinking about the next thing we’re going to say while not fully listening. Give yourself the pleasure to listen without expectations.
9. Forgive yourself and others. A grudge is a refusal to let go of your past in effort to prevent yourself from having a happy future. Pain and grief are a choice, not an automated process.
10. Do something creative. It can be as simple as taking a new route to work and as life-changing as writing a book. We are all creative beings.
11. Don’t fight negative emotions. Resisting them will cause them to persist. Instead, feel into them—allow them to be and give yourself permission to feel them. We were never meant to deprive ourselves of any feeling.
12. Put away your electronics. Addicted to stimulation, sometimes the most productive thing you can do is nothing at all. Some space and time to be human may do us all good.
13. Change your environment. We crave routine and habit, which provide us with safety, but we also need to balance that with novelty and new experiences. Changing your space can be a meditation for creativity.
14. Pay attention to small movements. We’re in a hurry to get somewhere, often mindlessly following the steps to get there. Pay more attention to the steps.
15. Take inspired action. Follow your intuition on something. Trust that the steps to get there will reveal themselves once you follow your guid towards action.
16. Learn to be okay with little. We believe that we need so much in our external world to be happy. Funny enough, simplifying your life reduces your need to rely on things that don’t authentically serve you.