Beginners guide to mindfulness

What are the benefits of mindfulness?

To be mindful is to be present in the moment. Practicing mindfulness can help us to not be consumed by worries about the past, or the future, or to be stuck or frozen into inaction, because we are ruminating on past experiences or fearful of future ones.

Mindfulness helps with a number of physical and mental health conditions. The research evidence says it helps with chronic pain, it reduces anxiety, it can lower stress levels, it can support better sleep and it can increase positive thinking therefore reducing negative emotions.

How can we practice mindfulness?

There are a number of ways of practicing mindfulness in our every day lives. For example, next time you brush your teeth or wash a cup, notice the feeling of the water on your hand, the feeling of your feet on the floor, the feeling of the brush or cup in your hand. What does the toothpaste or washing up liquid look and feel and smell like?

There are also ways to practice mindfulness that can support us with particularly tricky things like negative thoughts or pain. For example, we often use the Leaves on a Stream practice for negative thoughts and the Body Scan practice for physical pain or issues. There are others too, and we will use them in our therapy or group sessions, depending on indication, or you can look them up on mindfulness apps that are available online.

The point of mindfulness is to practice letting our thoughts be, without fighting with them, without using up our energy on them, and without being sucked into them. We want to practice having compassion and kindness for ourselves, and in recognising that thoughts are not facts, and we don’t need to be pulled into all our thoughts. Being present in the moment helps us with this.