A Mindful Perspective
5 steps to develop greater resilience through mindfulness and meditation
A journey of 21 days and 42 exercises
5 steps to develop greater resilience through mindfulness and meditation
A journey of 21 days and 42 exercises
Why should we cultivate greater resilience?
What is your initial reaction to disappointment, defeat or failure? Many of us, especially in light of the current situation, feel overwhelmed, frustrated, and powerless. Resilience is an empowerment that lets you face these obstacles with more mental strength!
This empowerment allows you to:
Mindfulness will help you face your fears and difficulties by adopting a new perspective to overcome them. It’s a lifelong process, therefore we do not promise resilience right after the challenge, but we rather want to encourage you to take this journey with us and to keep on exercising afterwards as well. Let’s prepare ourselves for the difficult times ahead of us and practice mindfulness to become more resilient!
We want to support you to build more resilience for the upcoming months in a 3 week challenge, as it usually takes 21 days to form a new habit!
This journey will bring you into contact with different aspects of yourself and your relationship with the outside world, as the search for greater resilience starts from within and depends on the willingness to get to know yourself and put yourself at the centre of it.
To provide guidance, we developed 5 steps combined with concrete exercises to pause and reflect:
Throughout the challenge, we want to aspire people to remain focused and to stay on track of the challenge, by making them write a journal about their experiences.
The meditations sessions and videos can be followed through the app or the website, while for the journal you can refer to this ebook.
You will also find space to write andtrack your progress and compare what you wrote at the beginning and end.
We often go through life in “autopilot”. Unfortunately, we miss many things including ourselves, other people and the many wonderful things happening around us.
Do you remember how you got to your desk this morning? Many of us don’t. Instead, on your way to your desk, or to your work place, thousands of thoughts went through your mind. You may have been planning your entire day, thinking about that uncomfortable conversation with your boss, what you will have for lunch that day, etc.
We race through life without really being aware of what is actually happening in the current moment. At the end of a day, we often end up exhausted, and too tired to think, and instead turn to TV, Social channels, etc.
Certainly, the autopilot helps us remember how to do things routinely. None of us want to learn how to operate the coffee machine each morning, right? ;-) But, what if we took a moment to pause, to stop this vicious circle of stress? If we simply take a step back, even just for 10 minutes a day, we will be able to take in life more consciously, be present, react with more awareness to situations.
In the long run, taking a step back will allow you to decide where you place your attention to. It will be a conscious decision if you want to reminisce about the past, anticipate the future, or enjoy the shower you are currently taking after a long day at work. It’s basically a matter of perspective, and where you choose to put it on. In case you are just as bad at remembering daily meditations as we are, in the app under settings, you’ll find a reminder you can set ;-)
Do you sometimes have the feeling of being submerged by the flow of your thoughts?
Discover how meditation can help you take a step back and become an observer instead
Our lives are made up of the light and the dark. Yet, our tendency goes to the dark more often than to the light side. Have you noticed this already?
We painfully focus on our imperfection and further empower it through negative thoughts. One of the biggest challenges that we face in our negative minds is the tendency to judge. We all have multiple ideas and made up opinions about everything and everyone, including ourselves. Our minds are basically made up of a steady stream of judging.
Do you recall a situation, where you were speaking to an authority, and in retrospective reassessed your performance and deemed it a total failure? The thoughts in your mind may have sound like this:
“I think I spoke too much...I should have voiced my opinion more…I’m sure he thinks I’m not a worthy employee to get the job done”.
This harsh self-criticism that is happening in your mind, perhaps even multiple times per day, is not only painful, but also increases our Cortisol levels. Cortisol is a stress hormone produced first by your mind, and then it expresses itself through your body (heart racing, sweating, heavy breathing).
Did you know that if we experience too much stress, we weaken our immune defense? Remember the first step? We spoke about being aware of your thoughts. When we pause our negative train of thoughts, we learn to realize just how judgemental we are, and that many of our opinions are actually black and white. Such a view gives us a very limited view of the world, especially during this time of pandemic.
Next time you judge yourself or any type of situation this harshly, ask yourself if these allegations are actually all true? Or are they simply a construction of your own assumptions?
Amazing! You’ve almost made it halfway through the challenge. It’s time to give yourself a pat on the back!
The last two steps taught you how to interrupt the constant train of thoughts, and explained how to observe your mind’s conversation with itself. We only began to critically assess how valid many of these thoughts were, and want to use this step to dismantle them further!
The body scan from the discovery program, which is one of the exercises you may (or not) have done as part of the challenge, is a helpful tool that you carry around with you all the time. It supports your awareness levels of your body, and helps you focus on the current moment.
By the way: when focusing on your body, a certain part of your brain is activated that guides you to more self-awareness and self-reflection in the long-run. It will take time to get there, but you are on your way to make it happen!
Mindfulness can also make us change our perspective. It helps us balance situations, and let’s us view the world through the eyes of others. Instead of seeing black or white, we see things more holistically.
You alone have the power to decide where you place your focus on: if you decide that the next couple of months will be the worst of your life, this will most probably become your core focus. All your thoughts and emotions will be tainted by this view, and you may likely experience a very painful period.
If you just opened your eyes, embraced the uncertainty that is all around us, and recognize that you have the power to design your own thoughts, the next couple of months will have a more positive outlook. Mindfulness and meditation can help you make these kind of conscious decisions. It allows you to stop negative feelings, by changing your perspective also onto the positive, but it takes practice to get there.
Slogans of international world leaders’ campaigns always add a positive spin to the years of leadership ahead of them. You would not following someone campaigning on the slogan “Everything will fall apart” - would you? ;-)
The way you think about yourself, others, and the future will have a tremendous effect on your world view and actual experiences.
If you just opened your eyes, embraced the uncertainty that is all around us, and recognize that you have the power to design your own thoughts, the next couple of months will have a more positive outlook.
Mindfulness and meditation can help you make these kind of conscious decisions. It allows you to stop negative feelings, by changing your perspective also onto the positive, but it takes practice to get there.
In positive psychology, the concept of gratitude refers to the feeling of appreciation for the beautiful things in life. Gratitude feels good, makes us smile, we feel more comfortable in our lives and in our bodies. We feel better with others. You also have more hope and more optimism!
It has been proven that people who keep a gratitude journal are happier than those who just look at what they lack. Perhaps this is the day you should write down what you are thankful for, even the small things in life….
It's already been more than two weeks since we started this journey together, you're doing great!
Maybe right now you're thinking "I didn't follow the program every day, now I feel terribly guilty...I should have done it". Have you already forgotten what we learned about non-judgement? Please don't feel guilty. At this very moment of guilt, stop for a few minutes, connect to your breath and observe what feelings emerge and how you feel about the resistance you are experiencing that distract you from your will to meditate every day.
It happens to all of us, don’t worry: "No, I don't have time today." "Today I don't really feel like it. Anyways, yesterday’s session already felt good, so that it doesn’t matter if I skip today”..”.meditating seems like a total waste of time, since I fall asleep after 2 minutes..." Does this monologue sound familiar?
Like when we work out in the gym and we can't expect to see the results on our muscles immediately, the same goes for our mind. With meditation we are training it, and one session will not be enough, constancy and perseverance will be fundamental. These practices are a way to reconnect to ourselves in moments of particular stress, but they are above all a way to make the mechanisms that we put into practice while meditating become automatic.
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Numerous studies have successfully proven the positive effects that mindfulness can have on our body and mind. As our muscles, also our brain can be changed throughout our entire life. This phenomenon is called neuroplasticity. That’s why Meditation and mindfulness exercises can help us be more resistant to stress, anxiety, burnout, attention deficits and hyperactivity, sleep disorders, addictions, diseases and pain, high blood pressure, social anxiety, difficult emotions. We train our mind to take a different path, to change our routine in order to stop nurturing our negative emotions.
Remaining anchored to our breath, even when our mind really seems to be in the middle of a storm or we perceive slight discomfort, allows us to develop mechanisms that become automatic in situations we live every day, whether negative, such as a difficult conversation or an obstacle that we had not foreseen, or positive, like a coffee sipped slowly on a sunny day, the smile of someone next to us or a short walk that makes us feel alive.
All this will not happen from one day to the next, you need to be patient and consistent, and we encourage you to follow our advice ;) which at this stage of the challenge will be dedicated mainly to how to build the best routine and to deal with the main resistance we may encounter, such as boredom, sleepiness and lack of motivation.
Let us briefly review what we have learned about how to develop greater resilience.
The first step is to stop, take a step back and become observers of our thoughts, so that we can decide where to place our attention to.
Second, we have seen how our way of judging our thoughts should not be judgmental, we should just be aware of what is in our lives.
Once we accept our thoughts, we must open our eyes and become aware that we can choose to tag along our emotional baggage and decide which emotions or feelings are actually useful, and which ones are a waste of energy.
In the fourth step, we have focused on the fact that in order to see results, we need consistency, dedication to a regular practice to enforce change in our minds. Eventually, meditation and mindfulness will turn into a habit and the benefits will manifest itself positively throughout your entire life!
At this point we do not expect you to have become a monk, that you are perfectly capable of managing your emotions or that you will leave everything to retire in Tibet.
Our goal was to plant a seed inside you, a seed that we hope you will continue to cultivate, so that it will become a strong and resistant tree, that will be the center of your stability in the most difficult moments and in the most positive ones. Find your balance accepting all situations with a certain level of kindness.
To become resilient means to remain firm, stable, like the tree, that despite winds, storms and scorching sun, remains rooted in the ground.
Now that you know, that dedication pays off, next time you tell yourself, “I don’t have time to meditate”, are you sure about that? ;-)
Hopefully this journey has given you strength and inspiration to continue! In the long run, you will learn to develop more confidence in yourself and in life.
If you have further questions about the app, you can find our articles and FAQ or contact us at help@petitbambou.com.
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See you soon!
Petit Bambou
You will realise that you cannot stop the waves. But you will learn to surf them better and better.
Jon Kabat Zin