Mindfulness, the awareness of your thoughts, emotions and sensations in the now. A key technique used to create an environment for your spiritual development, a connection with the world, and yourself. Whilst everyone can achieve mindfulness in their meditation practice, how can we maintain it through our hectic, everyday life’s?

Whilst here at Casa do Moinho we provide the tools for your practice, we understand how hard it may be to implement what you’ve learnt whilst getting on with everyday life. In order to help you achieve a mindful day, we’ve explored 2 articles from experts and extracted some information for you to reach this goal.

This first article by PsychCentral includes 7 ways in which we can utilise mindfulness outside of a formal practice. As stated in the article, mindfulness is anything but complicated, and can be practiced at so many points during the day. This could be during any routine activities that are usually done on autopilot, such as whilst brushing our teeth in the morning, taking a shower, folding clothes and waiting for the bus.

This sounds great and easily doable, but how can I actually remember to do all of this throughout the day? There’s some great advice in this article by headspace. It states that rather than trying to apply mindfulness into everything at once, focus on building a strong habit with one daily activity to practice mindfulness with everyday. Then, add another activity every week, and before you know it it’ll come naturally.

So what are 3 simple actions you can use to bring mindfulness into your daily life?

Have a formal meditation practice

Having a formal and consistent meditation practice teaches you how to tap into mindfulness. Once well developed, it can be easily applicable to everyday activities.

Make a mindful activity list

Make a list of daily activities that you can practice mindfulness with. This could be things like drinking your morning coffee, walking to work, folding clothes, any activity that you would normally do on autopilot.

Developing a habit

As mentioned earlier, by choosing one activity from your list to practice mindfulness with in your first week, you develop a habit. Then for every proceeding week, add another activity from your list to practice with.

It’s as easy as that, all you have to do is take the simple steps!