Mindful creativity

Mindful crafting and creativity can be fulfilling ways of building mindful activity into our lives. Whether you paint, stitch, sew, make, bake, decorate, or however you ‘do’ your creativity, it goes without saying that creativity can tick all three wellness boxes of achievement, connection and enjoyment. And, if you can add mindfulness do your crafting, you can increase the wellbeing benefits of creativity by using this time to stay present and train your mindfulness muscle.

Mindfulness is choosing to be in the present moment and adopting a compassionate non-judgemental stance towards your experience.

It’s well known that mindfulness can help us to develop greater resilience to life’s ups and downs, lead to greater calm and increase our awareness of our thoughts. As a CBT therapist in Bath, I regularly help clients to understand the idea that our thoughts impact on our feelings. If we can be aware of our own thought patterns, we are then better able to choose which thoughts are helpful to us, and which stand in the way of us leading the life we want to.

Mindful creativity

We’ve all seen those mindful colouring-in books by now, but it occurred to me that many people use these without really knowing how to colour or craft with mindful attention. So… a blog post is born. There’s no use turning to your colouring book or picking up some knitting needles and hoping your troubles will disappear, grumbling inwardly at the day’s stresses - your creative efforts will only suffer. Neither does it help you to settle down for a creative half hour and spend that time judging the fruits of your endeavours – perhaps you begin to compare it to other people’s work, or tell yourself that you can’t draw, or just aren't any good at being creative. These kinds of thoughts simply spoil your creativity, takes away the fun and leaves you feeling sorry for yourself. The answer is mindful creativity or mindful crafting.

To craft or create mindfully there are a few simple steps to get more from your creative pastimes.

The art of mindfulness

The first tip is to remember the main principle of mindfulness which is to pay attention on purpose. To pay attention, you can practise noticing when your mind wanders off to anything other than your chosen task. If you’re sketching and thinking about your shopping list or picking the kids up from school, then you’re not giving your task your full attention. This is to be expected, this is what minds do! The aim of mindful crafting is to notice each time your mind gets lost in its own thoughts. When you have dedicated time to your creativity, how does it help you now to be planning your weekly shop? There’s time for that later. Each time you notice your mind taking a walk, just thank your mind for its attention to the future or the past, and bring it back to the detail of now. Each time you do this, you can congratulate yourself, for this is the art of mindfulness.

It’s not always easy, because our minds are used to running on autopilot. What can help is to focus your attention on your creativity by using your senses. Sight can pull you into colours, shades and tones. Hearing can tune you into your activity by listening carefully to sounds you may never have before associated with your work. Touch can keep you in contact with your craft as you notice the weight of materials or tools, the texture of any fabrics, or the feel of any accessories you use. Smell and taste are also useful senses to tune in to, particularly if your creativity is in the kitchen.

An important aspect of mindfulness is a non-judgemental attitude. Mindfulness expert Shamash Alidina calls this 'kindfulness.' What this means is, as much as you can, notice and refrain from judging your work in any way, and let yourself be gentle and encouraging with your efforts. After all, what do you get when you begin to judge your own creativity? What impact does this have on your mood or your results? Notice any tendencies to judge or be down on yourself, and let this go. As before, use your senses to re-engage with your task.

I hope this helps to give you a start on mindful crafting or creativity. Spend your time truly engaged with your creativity and notice the results. If you can immerse yourself in crafting in this way, then you can begin to experience the state they call flow, when time flows effortlessly and you feel calm and engaged, giving you your best results. Happy creating!

Take a spring mindfulness walk

Mindful walking is an ideal way to practise your mindfulness. Now's the chance to make the most of longer days and head outdoors for a welcome boost of sunshine and fresh air. Here are five tips to make your walk more mindful, increasing feelings of relaxation and ease. Bringing mindful awareness to the everyday is something everyone can achieve and helps us to train our minds to become aware of our inner stories - the more we can familiarise ourselves with our mind's activities, the better we are able to step aside from unhelpful patterns of thinking. Here's how to take a mindful walk.

To begin

Choose your route - in a park, out in the country or even round your back garden. You can choose to be mindful for your whole walk or just set aside 10 minutes to immerse yourself in mindfulness.

You can follow these steps in any order you choose, as you go about your walk, but just remember, if your mind wanders off on its own individual walk, take it gently by the hand, and bring it back to the present one. Your mind will almost certainly be tempted to go its own way, thinking about the future or the past, but a mindful walk is one where you try as best as you can to immerse your body and mind in your surroundings. Each time your mind wanders, just bring it back to your chosen focus of attention, whether it be sights, sounds, sensations or smell. If you can, make a point of noticing where your mind wandered (perhaps it got caught up planning, thinking, judging, remembering, anywhere but on the walk!), and remember to thank yourself for remembering to be mindful.

Sights

Bring your awareness to the sights of spring around you. What can you see? Explore the colours, shapes, and contrasts? Perhaps you can spot unfolding leaves, blossom, dew, shoots breaking the earth... notice and be curious about whatever you might find. Perhaps you can get up close to particular objects and examine them as if you had never seen them before. Stay focused for a time on what you can see.

Sounds

When you're ready, tune in using your ears! What can you pick up on when you truly pay attention? See if you can listen in to nature. What the loudest sound, or the quietest, and everything in between? Can you even notice the silence between the sounds? Pay attention to the qualities of the sounds  - can you pick out  soft, sharp, staccato or secret sounds? What sounds are there to be found in nature? What's there for you?

Touch

You might like to bring your awareness to any sensations you can feel in or on your body. Can you feel a breeze? What's the temperature like? Can you feel the ground beneath your shoes? How does the ground feel? Just notice how it feels to be here, right now. 

You might also like to stop and touch blossom, or leaves. Explore the sensations of touch. How does the flower feel, how does it move as you touch it?

Smell 

Take a few moments to check in on the smells in nature. What can you smell in the air? Fragrance or freshness, remainders of rain, damp forest bark? Gather up the smells and truly be in this place as you walk.

Reflections

When your mindfulness walk is complete, take a few minutes to reflect on what you noticed during your walk? How was it to truly pay attention using your senses in this way? What can you learn from this? How could this knowledge be applied as you go about your day? Perhaps you can think of other activities you could try using this mindful awareness.

It's that simple. I hope you enjoy your mindful walking!

Mindfulness for beginners: breathing exercise

Thinking is great, except when it's not! Our brains are wonderful things - our thinking brains enable us to plan, speak, connect, problem-solve, create, invent and imagine. Unfortunately our minds have a natural tendency to seek out the negative. Many of the thoughts that stick around are the ones that can lead to worry and rumination. These thoughts can seem to pop up out of nowhere.

If you've ever suffered from stress, anxiety or depression, you'll know the sort of thoughts. The ones that hang about and really get to you. Nobody's immune. Research suggests that we have between 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts a day and around three-quarters of these are negative. You can thank your brain for that too. In evolutionary terms, this tendency to seek out threatening messages was useful for survival. Operating on a better-safe-than-sorry policy, our ancient ancestors who survived were the ones who could best negatively predict that a long curving object on the jungle floor was a snake and so stayed safe. The understanding being that positively presuming the said object was a stick would have been a risk to our survival as a species.

We're all living with the legacy of these tricky brains which are hardwired to seek out threats in our environment. Once we're suffering from anxiety or stress, and our fight or flight reflex has kicked in, our minds begin to race in an attempt to quickly evaluate threats, negative thoughts increase and we can soon get caught up in spirals of negative thinking. Fortunately, we can learn to manage the rise of negative thoughts, simply by paying attention to them with mindfulness exercises. The simplest technique is mindfulness of breath.

This is an ideal mindfulness exercise for beginners as it's portable and do-able. All you need is a few moments and your breath - which you always carry with you! Mindful breathing helps you to distance yourself from the content of negative thoughts, as, over time, you come to notice and understand that thoughts are often nothing but thoughts, and certainly they're not always facts. Learning to notice and let go of unhelpful thoughts can be key to combating anxiety and depression.

Here's how to practise mindfulness of breath. (You may like to spend anything between 5 and 15 minutes for this exercise.)

Begin by finding a place to sit, and, close your eyes. Adopt an upright posture, alert yet relaxed to enable you to pay attention. The aim isn't specifically to relax (although this is often a welcome side effect).

Settle as you are, noticing your feet upon the floor, hands in your lap and any points your body makes contact with your seat. Bring your attention to your breath now. Simply follow the rise and fall of your breathing. There's no need to try to change your breath at all. Just allow it to be as it is, letting it do its own thing, accepting things just as they are. Notice and follow the breath in your abdomen. If you like, you can place your hand there to feel this gentle movement. 

Be curious about the sensations of your breath, in and out. Become aware of where else you notice the breath in your body. Perhaps you feel it in your chest, or the sensations of the breath entering your nose. Bring your attention to wherever you feel it most, and see what sensations you discover. 

If at any point during this exercise, your mind does wander, you might be relieved to know, this is completely normal. Simply make a note of where your mind has wandered and bring your focus back to your breathing. It can help to note with a simple word, such as 'thinking', 'feeling', 'planning', 'judging', 'remembering', what your mind was doing and return your focus to your breath. Every time you notice your mind has wandered know that this is part of the exercise - you've managed a moment of mindfulness. Treat your mind as if it were a bouncy puppy, who needs to be reminded to come back to heel, over and over again. There's no need to get cross with it, only gentle reminders are needed to begin to train your mind to stay present, instead of running back to the past or taking a wander into the future.

Continue paying attention to your breathing for your chosen time (some people find a timer helps). When you're ready to bring this exercise to a close, begin to notice the sounds around you, and the feeling of your feet on the floor, and your body in the chair. Slowly open your eyes, and take in the sights around you. Give yourself a couple of moments to take everything in, and move into the rest of your day.

Mindfulness of chocolate

Are you one of those people who tends to scoff a bar of chocolate and then wonder where it's gone? Or do you savour each piece, making it last, feeling satisfied and content, getting the most from every moment? If you're the latter, then congratulations, you're well on the way to mindful awareness.

If not, here's a taster of mindfulness you can try at home, or at your desk, any time you choose. This is one of my favourite exercises when I am introducing clients to the benefits of Mindfulness, because it's simple and begins the practice of focus and present moment awareness. During the exercise, just try as best as you can, to keep your focus on the chocolate... Here's how to experience a mindful moment and discover the benefits of being present.

You will need: Your choice of square of chocolate, chocolate button, Minstrel or Smartie (just one, yes!) If you don't like chocolate, simple, try substituting the chocolate with a small piece of dried fruit, or other small treat. 

Spend about 20-30 seconds on each step...

1. Unwrap the wrapper, listening to the sound of the paper and slowly remove your piece of chocolate.

2. Take the chocolate in your hand and use your eyes to take in every detail of that chocolate - shape, texture, colour, any patterns. What do you see? And use sense of touch to take in the weight, the temperature and the texture. What do you find?

3. Now move the chocolate to your nose and breathe in the scent of the chocolate. What are its qualities? How do you sense the smell of the chocolate?

4. Take the chocolate to your ear and, this might seem strange, but tap the chocolate and see what noise it makes... Again, what do you notice?

5. Bring the chocolate to your lips and rest it there for a moment. What do you notice happening? What do you want to do? Do you notice any thoughts?

6. Place the chocolate in your mouth and just rest it there. What happens now? Resist the urge to chew! 

7. After a short while, you can now bite into the chocolate. What do you notice? Flavour, taste, relief that you can now eat the chocolate?

8. Savour the chocolate for as long as you like and reflect on what you noticed during this exercise.

Many people say they didn't realise how much they miss when they ordinarily munch through their chocolate. If we can pay this much attention to a single piece of chocolate, think about how the magic of this mindfulness practice widens out into how much we miss in everyday life when we act on autopilot and tuck in to life, without really paying attention to what is going on around us and inside of us. Who knew there was so much to a piece of chocolate?