Practicing mindfulness and focusing our awareness on the present moment has become very difficult in the current times. With our hectic jobs, academic schedules, and preoccupations, most of us are unable to pay close attention to our feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations.
Where our busy schedules hold us back from practicing mindfulness in the conventional ways, such as meditation and yoga, we can bring it into practice by paying close attention while doing our everyday chores.
With our hectic jobs, academic schedules, and preoccupations, most of us are unable to pay close attention to our feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations.
There are a lot of things in everyday life that we all do, without even paying close attention to them. Such basic chores simply go unnoticed as we are accustomed to doing them almost every day. Also, part of the reason we do not tend to pay attention is that our minds keep wandering. Simple household rituals can be calming and even gratifying when you throw yourself into them completely.
Two such activities, I recently engaged myself in, was doing the dishes and boiling water, but mindfully. By being present and aware, I focused on the smell of soap, how lather covered the dishes, how the temperature of water felt against my hands, the sound of water and the dishes. I was astonished to see how calm and relaxed I felt after doing this, so I decided to practice this in a unique way, by observing boiling water. Normally, we would not pay a lot of attention to something this minute, but if we throw ourselves into it completely, focus on every detail and sensation, it can work wonders! As all my attention was focused on watching the water boil, I was able to hear the fizzling sound of water, see bubbles on the surface of it and steam coming out of the pan, which I normally would have just ignored. I completed my observation in 7 to 8 minutes, and it felt like I had engaged myself in an offbeat type of meditation.
Two such activities, I recently engaged myself in, was doing the dishes and boiling water, but mindfully.
Selective attention or the ability to focus on a particular stimulus while ignoring others has a great role to play here. A small study at the Florida State University that focused on this topic, divided two groups of people, where the first group was made to wash the dishes mindfully and the other was not given any instruction. The results revealed that people who engaged themselves in cleaning the dishes mindfully upped their feelings of inspiration by 25 percent and lowered their nervousness levels by 27 percent whereas those who saw it as a mundane everyday chore did not gain any benefits from the task (Stewart, 2018).
This along with enormous other chores like setting up the bed, cleaning the house and even bathing can be done mindfully to help you connect to yourself.
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