How to Stay Mindful in a Chaotic World

It feels like every five seconds something is vying for my attention. Even if I have "nothing to do" I can still break out my phone and find hours worth of content to read, fights to join on the internet, and influencer examples of how my life "should" look. 

The result of all this is, even though I'm mostly self-quarantined, it still feels like I have no time for mindfulness. 

Today I want to explore a little about why that is, and how to practice mindfulness in easy ways.

The opposite of mindful is mindless.

Think of the mindless things you do every day.

For me, it's grabbing food from a drive-through window and eating it in the car, scrolling through Instagram and Facebook posts at a mile a minute, and diving deep into Youtube or Netflix holes and just watching content for hours. 

How do I know they're mindless? 

Because I do them without thinking. 

I very seldom sit down and think "I want to go on Facebook and connect with my friends right now". Instead, I just look up from my phone at some point and realize that I've been scrolling for about 20 minutes and I don't even remember opening the app. 

Sometimes I'll fix myself a plate of food and the next thing I know I've been on my couch for three hours watching a new Netflix show. Sometimes, if I don't even really like the show, I will continue to sit there watching it AND open my phone and scroll through Facebook or Instagram. 

These activities start like reactions, like habits, and not intentionally. 

Partly, this is because these apps are specifically designed to be habit-forming. They make more money the more we use them. So they're designed to be addictive. 

But mindless behavior also happens as a result of me not wanting to deal with unpleasant emotions, like boredom, loneliness, or stress. Not in a helpful way that helps me actually deal with these emotions, of course, but in an anesthetic way that can take me out of my own mind for a while. 

When I'm in any way uncomfortable, I seek distractions. And distractions are the opposite of mindfulness. 

Finding mindfulness. 

Step 1. Minimize distractions. 

Put your phone away somewhere. Don't keep it with you. You are much less likely to find yourself mindlessly scrolling or mindlessly playing a game or diving into a research rabbit hole if your phone is even a short walk away in another room. You can also uninstall problematic apps, like Instagram or Youtube, from your phone if you find yourself using them without intending to. You can always reinstall them later once you've found new strategies to help manage your stress and emotions. 

Step 2. Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness is hard, especially when you're not used to it. It can feel boring or uncomfortable to be in the present moment because we're used to being constantly distracted by entertainment or our own thoughts. 

Start small and practice often, just like any new skill you're learning. Don't shoot for a 20-minute meditation session right off the bat. 

Instead, try doing a few tasks mindfully. 

Turn off your podcasts, your music, your audiobooks, and go for a walk with just the ambient noise around you. 

Wash your dishes mindfully, or play with your dogs mindfully. 

Choose one or two things and decide that, for the duration of that activity, you will choose to stay present and not add any extra stimulation. 

Step 3. Find Mindful Friends

It's more enjoyable to stay present when people you enjoy are there with you. While I don't recommend trying to push your significant other, friends, or family into a mindfulness practice (better to lead by example and avoid any fights!) I do recommend putting yourself in situations where you can be mindfully present with others. Maybe this is a book club or yoga class, where everyone is present in the moment and has their phones away. It might be a church group or a hiking club. Even virtual gatherings can be mindful if you manage them right. 

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Do you have your own go-to strategies for staying mindful when the world seems to be pulling you off track? I’d love to hear about them.

And, as always, if you need a little extra support getting your mindfulness practice going, click here to set up a free 30-minute intro call with me today!

The Power of Our Money Story

Our money stories are so incredibly potent and for most of us they remain under the surface. We never think to examine them or how they got written. But all of these beliefs we have about money subconsciously color our behavior, the choices we make, and our ability to attract money into our lives.

My money story was shaped by my parents, and their money story in turn was shaped by their parents.

The stories we tell ourselves about money can shape our financial lives if we let them.

My mom grew up in a home without a reliable income. Her mother passed away when she was a little girl and her father often left them alone. My mother and her siblings started working early to support themselves and each other. My mother worked to pay her own way through college and has worked ever since.

My dad grew up in a home with two parents and plenty for all of them. They had a big house and a summer house in the woods. They had a large extended family and everyone was fairly well off. My dad took a blue collar job and never finished college but always had enough money.

I grew up in a mixture of two money stories. From my mother I learned that money was very important and that our main quest should be to put ourselves in the position to earn as much money as possible. That is how we would keep ourselves and our families safe and provided for. She liked to talk about how I should enroll in engineering school or pharmacy school because that's where the money is.

But we also never worried that we wouldn't have enough. I was able to attend private schools as a child, and we were gifted our house by my grandparents. I may not have had the fanciest version of everything all the time, but I definitely had what I needed. I was able to travel, to have family vacations. My parents were able to help pay for some of my college fees.

I developed this weird combination money story of "I will never have enough money but I will be able to live the life I want anyway".

I was able to finish college and a masters degree, but had a sizable mountain of loan debt afterward. That didn't seem strange to me because it fit right into my money story.

When I got my first job out of grad school and was barely making enough to cover rent and expenses, I didn't find it strange. It fit right into my story. I would never have enough, but I was living the life I wanted.

I didn't even notice my money story until my partner and I married and combined our finances. He had a completely different money story and let’s just say they didn't mesh well. After examining my money story and bringing it to the surface it became easier to talk about, and it's easier for us to plan our money together.

I still have work to do, though.

I was able to change my money story from "I will never have enough but it's ok" to "I have enough". But now I have just enough!

The next step is working to manifest abundance.

Because “just enough” is not the way my money story will end. I am working on writing a new money story intentionally, instead of inheriting what my parents taught me subconsciously or simply trying to course correct.

How powerful it would be to write a money story based on what I actually believe and what I want to see in my life!

And to anyone who thinks that this whole money story thing is a bit out there, what is money but a story that we collectively tell ourselves? Money is an idea that we have all agreed to and accepted. The first step to changing our economy and our worlds' money story is to change the stories we tell ourselves.

Unearthing My Fear

Lots of things are scary in life, and starting your own business or even switching to a new career or a new job can be one of them. I'm excited to finally be participating in Spirit Junkie Masterclass to help me grow and develop not just as an entrepreneur but as a spiritual entrepreneur - one whose goals and ambitions are rooted in helping others find the power of love and acceptance and support.

The most powerful thing that I did during the first week of the masterclass was writing my fear statement. I know it's an activity I will come back to over and over.

Fears are powerful, especially the unspoken ones that we hide deep down and may not even realize ourselves. During a free-writing about my fears I realized that probably the biggest fear and limiting belief I have carried is that I am not a likable person.

Fears are powerful, especially the unspoken ones that we hide deep down and may not even realize ourselves.

When I was young I changed schools several times. Once because my family moved to a new town. Then I changed schools twice more as I moved through private schools into the public school system. In my early years I often felt like if I wanted friends I would have to win them. I would have to engage in ways that showed them I was fun, nice, exciting, smart, cool.

In my head I developed a subconscious ranking system of who I could possibly be friends with. Who would I be able to convince that I was likable? Who was too cool, pretty, or popular to be open to accepting me?

As an adult this shows up in some interesting ways. I don't like to wait for book signings or photographs with people I admire. I often feel like I won't be accepted by those I admire the most.

Writing all of this out feels incredibly vulnerable. I'm not saying that I didn't have great friends and wonderful relationships, but in new social situations or job interviews or meeting new people I am still constantly finding myself "performing" who I think I should be in that situation. It keeps me from making authentic connections, and sometimes even exacerbates the problem.

Through listening to this fear that I'm unlikeable I have put up barriers between myself and so many other people. These barriers make me feel safer but also keep me from ever being able to prove the fear wrong. It leads me to compare myself with others constantly, and creates bitterness and disharmony in my life.

I'm so thrilled that I'm able to finally recognize this fear and start the work of transforming this fear into love.

Freedom from this fear will allow me to form more authentic connections with my clients, students, and fellow humans. It will allow me to bring my whole self to my work, and it will allow me to experience deeper peace and love.

I'm feeling so energized now that I am doing this work, and I can't wait to see what else I learn throughout this process!

Wellness vs. Fitness

“Your body can stand almost anything. It’s your mind that you have to convince.”

“Fitness is like a relationship. You can’t cheat and expect it to work.”

“Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they worked on it every single day!”

So many fitness quotes and phrases seem to be geared towards struggle and hard work. It’s this philosophy of pushing past the pain, sticking to it even when it’s hard, and refusing to give up or give in until you reach your goal. My own personal fitness journey mirrors that of many other women I know: periods of absolutely no exercise and eating whatever I want, interspersed with shorter, intense periods of working out regularly and subscribing to a regimented diet or nutrition plan. I was able to make huge gains that way, but they weren’t sustainable.

A great way to tell if your exercise is boosting your wellness is how you feel while you're doing it! Photo by Matheus Ferrero on Unsplash

For me, working out every day and sticking to a list of foods I can and can’t eat in certain quantities is not how I want to live my life. So when I picked up a new training plan for my first marathon (AH! I’ve gone crazy!) it was important to give myself leeway and flexibility. I found that out the hard way in my third week of training. I’d stuck to every single scheduled run. Long runs, medium runs, fast runs, all of them! And then one day while I was stretching I felt a pop in my foot. It wasn’t much. It wasn’t painful. But I remember thinking “this is a message. If I ignore it, it will get worse.”

I took a path I’m not particularly practiced on: I “gave up”. I took a week of rest, and did some research on running forums about the particular pain I was experiencing. It turns out that running in old shoes, or shoes that were the wrong shape, were probably causing the pain. Or running too much too soon. Or just the shape of my foot. Options for treatment, if it got worse, would be surgery or no more running.  I took it slow when I started back up, got new shoes that fit better, and started listening to my body.

Injuries happen more often when our bodies are tired and not working efficiently. They happen more often when our muscles are tense and tight. Super-intense athletic activity can lead to injury, more often than not, that eventually ends enjoyment of the sport that caused it.

If your primary goal is to stay well and mobile and happy into your old age, then you need to slow down sometimes and listen to what works in your body. You need to have the humility to understand that sometimes when it seems like you’re too tired to work out, you actually ARE too tired to work out. If it seems like your daily yoga classes are triggering your knee injury, that might be exactly the case. You need to ask yourself: When is sticking to a fitness goal compromising my overall wellness?

My new training plan is based on time instead of distance, and my heart rate. There are still days when the run is harder than others, but since I know starting out how long I’ll be running, regardless of distance, I never feel rushed to pick up the pace. I have more room to pay attention to what’s happening in my body. I enjoy my runs now, and I know when I want to skip a run, it’s not because I’m lazy. It’s because my body needs that extra rest.

Wellness isn't just intentionally working. It's intentionally relaxing, too!

Photo by Haley Phelps on Unsplash

So how can you build your fitness routine into a wellness routine?

1.     Set a goal that’s unique to you

Instead of aiming for a pace or a distance or an objective goal, like 50 repetitions, aim for “as much as I can do in x minutes”, and then be gentle with yourself. If you need to slow down, slow down. If you need to stop, stop. Instead of measuring your progress against an objective goal, measure your progress against your last month’s progress. Or, better yet, don’t measure your progress at all! Just pay attention to how you feel when you’ve done some physical activity versus how you feel when you don’t!

2.     Incorporate a relaxation practice.

Stressing and straining your body on a regular basis should be counterbalanced with resting and relaxing your body on a regular basis. This can be a meditation practice, gentle stretching, or restorative yoga, or even a hot bath! Whatever you do to relax your body, try to do it as frequently as you would do your training or strenuous activity. For example, if you run 3 days a week, do your relaxation practice 3 days a week as well. Better yet, you can incorporate rest and work into one session, like a yoga class that balances strength with ease, or a jog that mixes running with walking. Having just one rest day in a week of hard work is about as realistic as pulling all–nighters all week and just sleeping on weekends.

3.     Practice listening to your body.

Our body sends signals that we can pick up if we’re paying attention. Soreness, pain, thirst, hunger, exhaustion: all of these are clues that your body needs more support. If you ignore and push through when the signals are quiet, your body will send you a louder signal that will be harder to ignore. These can sometimes be pretty devastating, and might end up with you stuck on the couch for much longer than you planned.  So get curious about what your body is telling you: Where could that soreness be coming from? Why am I so tired? What do I need more of? Less of? Basically, start listening and responding to these cues from your body instead of tuning them out.

By setting your own subjective goals, prioritizing relaxation as much as exercise, and listening to the messages your body sends you can start moving away from just fitness and toward a more sustainable wellness journey!