Hello and Happy New Year!
I hope you’ve all had a wonderful body-sovereign holiday season and are ready to embark on to the adventures of what 2016 brings us. Let’s start the year here at Embracing the Body Divine with some reflection on nurturing mindfulness to help us become more body sovereign.
Those of us on journey’s of improving our well-being hear a lot about the importance of mindfulness. The word is tossed around so much I wonder if many of us just kind of tune it out….”yeah, yeah, I know …..be mindful!”, or if we stop to think if we actually have an understanding of mindfulness that we can relate to, and if it has practical application in our lives. So, ask yourself what your understanding of mindfulness is. Is it something you bring into your day to day life? If yes, how? If no, why not? I offer up what I have to come when it comes to being mindful, and why it is a helpful practice to cultivate.
According to Jon Kabat-Zinn (author and founder of the stress reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, mindfulness means non-judgementally paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment. In our quest for Body Sovereignty, we nurture mindfulness to help us pay attention to our body and become present to our physical and emotional experience of the world. This includes noticing and honouring our hunger/fullness signals, discerning our tastes and preferences allowing us to tune into what we really are hungry for (both physically and emotionally). We strive to be self aware enough to recognize our pain and dig deeper to find out what is going on for us on days we ‘feel fat’ or find we cannot satisfy our physical hungers. When we are mindful, we pay attention to our body’s needs for movement, rest, nutrition, and self care.
Why is it important?
Mindfulness plays a major role in helping us regain our body sovereignty by rebuilding trust in our physical body and in ourselves. For instance, becoming mindful helps us to trust that we know when, what and how much to eat and how and when to move our bodies. Mindfulness is the bridge to communicating with our physical, emotional and spiritual selves. Taking the importance of mindfulness a step further, let’s consider how it relates to self compassion. In reclaiming our body sovereignty, mindfulness and self compassion are intertwined and deepening one practice can only help but support the other. To give ourselves compassion, we first have to be mindful and become aware of our suffering. At the same time, unless we trust that we will treat ourselves with compassion and kindness, we won’t have the sense of safety we need to be vulnerable enough to delve deeply into our thoughts, feelings, emotions and see with clarity what is going on inside. Mindfulness helps us see where we need to offer ourselves compassion, compassion helps us to feel safe enough to be open to the information mindfulness offers us.
There are many books, articles and website on mindfulness and I encourage you to explore and see if there is an author or an approach that you resonate with. Two books that I recommend are:
1) The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh and 2) Eating in the Light of the Moon by Dr. Anita Johnston. The Center for Mindful Eating has a lot of great resources as well and you can find their site here: http://www.thecenterformindfuleating.org/
The good new is, for most of the us the first step in nurturing mindfulness is simply taking a moment and paying attention to our breath. When it comes to mindfulness, our breath is the beginning and the end…the Alpha and the Omega. Learning to regularly tune into our breathing…becoming aware of it, slowing it down…is a powerful tool for becoming more mindful…in all aspects of our lives. So no need to wait for a book or to take a course, simply start with your breath, here and now.
For tools on how to explore further the gifts of mindfulness, and the other two elements of body sovereignty, compassion and discernment and how they can enhance your relationship with your body check out my Reclaiming Body Sovereignty Workbook.
Thank you for reading!
Sydney