Self care is so crucially important with ones health, physically emotionally and mentally! Without caring for one's mental health, the other two will suffer and be impacted negatively!
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Mice in your kitchen, ants at the picnic, screaming children, losing your temper, grouchy boss—life is full of imperfections. And yet it's uncanny how hard we try to keep everything tidy and together. In fact, when we start to loosen up our habits of perfectionism we discover strength and resilience within.
It's 5:30 on a Sunday morning and you wake from your slumber to hear the kids stirring in their bedrooms down the hall.
"Your turn to get up," you say, nudging your partner. So he does, drowsily leaving the room only to return a few minutes later—followed, not surprisingly, by your two kids.
As they happily bounce on the bed, you grumpily try to convince them to go play on their own. It's no use. While your partner snuggles back under the covers, you drag yourself out of bed.
Later that morning you find a moment to talk with your partner. "What happened? I thought it was your turn to get up with the kids today."
He shrugs. "They really should be able to entertain themselves at their age, shouldn't they?"
You feel yourself bristle. "Maybe they should, but they never have. Why did you expect anything different today?"
The concept of mindfulness often brings up images of relaxation, stillness, or acting in some beatific, staid manner. Indeed, there's a widely held assumption that being mindful means you're always calm and in control. And because of this perception, mindfulness itself is sometimes miscast as a set-up for personal failure. "Life's hard enough without aiming for being mindful all the time."
Yet the notion that mindfulness imparts some unrealistic state of human perfection misses the point. Not only does it not equal perfection, it encourages quite the opposite view of our lives. For as much as you'd like to think you could be cheerful and understanding about—maybe even grateful for—your children's abundant early morning energy and generous about your partner's need to catch up on sleep, too, you're tired, and yes, annoyed. The reality is that living peacefully with our families, friends, and colleagues requires patience with an awful lot of things.
Most anywhere in life, being mindful starts in part with accepting the fact that we cannot ever be fully mindful in the first place. Our brains just aren't wired that way. And life itself is unendingly unpredictable; imperfection is the norm. It's how we live with these facts that influences our moment-to-moment well-being.
So, sure, one aspect of mindfulness is aiming to be more focused. That's because otherwise most of us spend much of our time doing one thing while paying attention to something else. We're not aware in any useful way about what we're doing, saying, or thinking. Not only do we miss out on many meaningful moments when we do this, we also fail to notice the assumptions and choices we're making throughout the day.
Yet even when we actively practice mindfulness, we can't sustain focused attention for long. Over and over again we get distracted by our own minds. Sure, when we notice ourselves lost in thought, we bring ourselves back to present awareness—until the next time our minds wander.
