It is not easy when you’re feeling unsupported and alone. Maybe you feel like you are giving your best but you’re not getting anything in return. Maybe feelings of anger and disappointment start to come up which you might not feel able to express out loud so you push it down and feel unheard, sad and hopeless.
All of this was a common theme in my life until I found out about the practice of mindful awareness and meditation. That is when everything turned around.
The Practice of Mindful Awareness
Through the practice of awareness, we can connect to a much deeper, kinder and more compassionate place inside. All it takes is to simply set aside a few minutes each day to focus on your breath and become still. As you relax hold all of the thoughts and feelings that are here in this moment, in a wide embrace of loving compassionate awareness. Just by connecting to that bigger part of ourselves, the loving awareness, you will find that negative thoughts and emotions start to lose their grip on you.
The magical part is that something much more positive and wholesome starts to arise – automatically without even trying! It is amazing how easy it is to disengage from being caught up in our sadness, anger, disappointment, regret or any other negative emotions and thoughts when we connect to our bigger more expansive compassionate self. With practice, it becomes so easy to let go whenever you start feeling yourself being overtaken by a wave of negativity. You just relax into remembering that you are something bigger than all of this and that actually you are fully supported and nurtured from the inside.
Here are some suggestions about what you can do each day to build a positive attitude
- Allow yourself to develop greater self-awareness. Choose to set aside some moments throughout your day to become still and pay attention to what is going on inside of you. Negative thoughts often form below your conscious level of awareness. Most of us get so used to them being in our heads that we hardly notice anymore. This is where we end up being driven by unconscious reactions. To turn the tide of negativity, you need to develop a deeper level of self-awareness.
- Pay attention to what you are focusing on. Catch your negative thoughts. Perform self-checks several times a day. Pay attention first to how you feel. If you’re feeling negative, irritable, pessimistic, anxious or stressed, surround those feelings with a loving compassionate embrace and allow them to be acknowledged instead of trying to push them away or being overtaken by them.
- Choose a thought that feels better. Change your focus to something that uplifts you. Visualize a flower or a turquoise blue sea or a smiling face. Imagine the freshness of having a luxurious scented shower … whatever makes you feel uplifted, fresh, alive! What you say and think to yourself with your inner voice and imagination silently governs everything you do and ultimately how well you do it. Whilst nothing at all has changed outwardly your inner self-talk can lead you to a much more positive frame of mind and you’ll feel more at peace, fully supported and ready to take on the world.
Change Your Thoughts Change Your Experience
If you work at shifting the way you look at the experiences of life, you’ll be surprised how quickly your negative thoughts and habits can dissolve. We are always attracting more opportunities into our lives to experience more of where we are at in our current state of being. When you are being positive you have happy thoughts, say positive things, do fun, positive things and your reality is happy. However, when you are being ruled by anger your thoughts will be angry and maybe you’ll speak angry words and your actions will be fuelled with anger. It will seem that the whole world is full of anger and that is often what gets fed back to you, mirroring your angry state.
The more you practice changing your focus towards emphasizing the positive the more you will empower yourself and before you know it, you’ll be enjoying a much better and more satisfying quality of life. However, it is not just about making positive affirmations, which will not work if you have not laid the groundwork first by acknowledging your underlying negative feelings. Breathe, be still, observe with compassion whatever is here, acknowledge, let go and then, and only then allow yourself to move into a more positive way of being.