Rituals and Practices for a Mindful Start to 2020
As we welcome in the first new year of the decade, what better way to usher it in than with your practice of mindfulness? For some, it may be a familiar walk in the park or a gentle reset to your life after those couple of weeks (or months!) of holiday madness. For others, it may be welcoming a new practice and habit of living life to a healthier and simpler standard.
Wherever you might be in your mindful health journey, you can practice mindfulness anywhere, anytime. The simplest way is to gently bake it into your daily life, so it becomes a ritual or natural habit, rather than a chore.
Let’s begin our Day of Mindfulness in 2020 with these rituals and practices.
1. A Morning Routine
Having a morning routine not only sets the tone for the rest of your day, but it helps to train your body to get the day started. As meditation app Headspace says it, a morning routine is “not about trying to build a 3-hour morning routine — it is about quality, ritual, and the motivation to get started” (1). Ultimately, it is about creating space in the beginning of the day to slow down, check in with yourself and start the day off on the right foot.
A mindful morning routine could include a few activities like:
Waking earlier than the absolute last minute before catching your train to work
5-10 minutes of silent meditation
Gentle yoga practice to awaken the body
A home-cooked and healthy breakfast
Sharing a meal with your loved ones
A few pages of reading in the quiet moments of the early morning
A few pages of journaling or gratitude writing
Making a list to organise and plan your day ahead
If creating a morning routine is completely new to you, fear not! When creating a new habit, make sure that you are “honest with yourself and approach your new habits in a realistic and progressive way” (2). There is a science to building new habits if you want them to stick, so don’t select new habits that do not resonate with you -- especially if you are forcing yourself to do it because everyone else around you is doing it!
When forming new habits, like a morning routine, studies have shown that in order to create new habits, you will also need to include “an intrinsic reward that helps develop and maintain...a habit” (3). Unless the habit itself is “intrinsically rewarding,” such as working out, which has a physiological effect, “such as...endorphins or serotonin” (3).
2. A Meditative Commute to Work
Practicing mindfulness on our way into work will help set the mood for what your workday could look like. Whether you walk, bike, train or drive to work, there are a few simple ways to practice mindfulness on the way to your office.
If you take a train or are a passenger on the way to work, instead of seeing this as a time that you may be stuck in traffic or a crowded space, you can change your perspective and see this as an opportunity to slow down for yourself. Take these moments to relax, silently meditate, and clear your mind. Gently close your eyes, place your hand on your belly and take a few deep breaths in. Deepen your breath to observe and feel the fluidity of your breath, as it flows through your belly, lungs, chest and repeat. Become an observer of your thoughts and sounds that surround you, as you continue on your way to work.
If you walk, bike or drive to work, obviously you won’t be able to close your eyes and meditate while making your way to the office. Instead, take this time to slow down and start to (safely!) observe the things on your way in. If you drive, instead of getting angry at traffic or the driver who may have cut you off, put on a podcast and use this time to feed your brain. Or if you drive in with a stranger or friend, use this time to converse and connect with the human beside you. If you walk or bike, perhaps you can start to notice the things around you -- the sun on your face, the wind in your hair, the architecture of the buildings surrounding you, or the dogs walking alongside you.
Taking time to be present wherever you are is a beautiful and easy way to practice mindfulness within your day.
3. Practicing Compassion at Work
It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind of work with meetings, hundreds of emails and sometimes unpleasant encounters with your colleagues. When things get tough at work or you have colleagues that you may not get along with, it may seem difficult to practice compassion not only at work, but towards the people you work with.
By cultivating a practice of compassion, “it changes our brain and will give us much more control over our thoughts and our lives” (4). As compassion “is rooted deeper in brain systems having to do with intentionality and motivation,” we can “cultivate it, help it grow and mature, through practice” (4).
Ultimately, when we create a practice of compassion, we create a sense of mindfulness and awareness, “cultivate compassionate attention, compassionate thinking, compassionate feeling, and compassionate behaviour” (4). When we do this, “We learn to be open to suffering in others as well as to suffering in ourselves—and then we can act to alleviate that suffering” (4).
For example, if you find yourself being triggered by a colleague’s seemingly passive aggressive email, instead of immediately firing back a nasty response, take a few moments to breathe deeply, re-center yourself and re-read the message. Was this person actually being passive aggressive, or is it in how you read this email? Was this person intentionally being cruel? Is there something going on in this person’s home life that has caused this type of reaction? How can you show compassion towards this person?
It is important to remember that a person’s behaviour is never a reflection of you, but a projection of what is truly going on deeper within themselves. You can never control another person’s actions, but you do have the power to control how you react to it. Choosing compassion over reaction allows you to become vulnerable with another human being, and can even allow space for this person to open up to and release what may actually be going on underneath the surface.
4. Being Present at the Dinner Table
It can be easy to come home after work and unload all of the day’s happenings onto your partner or loved ones. Perhaps you need a few moments to vent about what happened or to celebrate a particular significant event. Whatever it may be, be sure that it is not the only topic that stays at the dinner table, because we all need to disconnect and leave the office at the office.
When preparing for your meal, be sure to disconnect from your phone, avoid watching television, and truly be present to the moment in the kitchen. It could be a chance to catch up with your partner or loved ones and hear about their days’ events or exciting news. It is a time to mindfully prepare and cook a homemade meal for yourself and your loved ones. Institute for Integrative Nutrition founder, Joshua Rosenthal, has coined the term “Primary Food -- the aspects of life that nourish your soul and satisfy your hunger for life” (5). And “Love is one of the most important of the Primary Foods,” which Joshua likes to call Love “Vitamin L” (5).
By nurturing our “Primary Foods” in life, such as the healthy relationships in our life, we create more intimacy and love into our lives, which ultimately need to being well connected with others on a deeper level. It is important to spend our time and energy on relationships that bring us joy, which starts by being present for the important people in our lives.
5. Evening Ritual Practice
My favourite way to close out the day is through an evening ritual, which is not unlike your morning ritual. It tells your body that you are slowing down for the evening, and activates your parasympathetic nervous system (the “rest and digest” response), as well as preparing yourself physically and mentally for the night’s sleep. By allowing the body to go into the parasympathetic nervous system, it “activates the more tranquil functions of the body; those that help maintain a healthy, long-term balance” (6).
An evening ritual can include different activities than your morning ritual to help you slow down, unwind and prepare for the evening. A few of these could include:
Evening meditation
A warm cup of herbal tea
Gratitude journaling
Gentle yoga stretches
Reading a few pages of a book
Dimming the lights
Taking a bath
Putting your phone on airplane mode 2 hours before bed
Spending quality time with your loved ones
Whatever your day may look like, you can see that there are many different ways to slowly and gently incorporate mindfulness practices -- big or small -- into your life. It is not about overturning your life and fitting as many practices as possible, but rather, about the journey of how we become more aware and more present to the ‘ordinary’ moments in our everyday lives.
Sources
1. Headspace. Morning Meditation: How to Start Your Own Routine.
2. Quora. The Science Behind Adopting New Habits (And Making Them Stick), 2018.
3. Iowa State University. More than just a cue, intrinsic reward helps make exercise a habit, 2016.
4. Gilbert, P. How to Turn Your Brain from Anger to Compassion, 2013.
5. Rosenthal, J. NOTES FROM IIN’S FOUNDER: HOW TO BOOST YOUR VITAMIN L, 2013.
6. Fawne, H. “Fight or Flight” vs. “Rest and Digest”, 2018.
About the author Josie Ng
Josie Ng is a certified yoga teacher, Reiki practitioner and holistic health coach in training. She helps the modern day human to become the best version of themselves — by bringing the Mind, Body, and Spirit, into happy harmony. Currently residing on the beautiful island of Hong Kong, you will often find her making friends with every stray kitty on the street, stretching at the local yoga studio, or eating her way throughout whichever country she finds herself in.
Josie writes on different health-related topics, always from the heart, with the aim to make your health journey more fun, mindful, ánd simple.