At least in my opinion. There are people who hear about mindfulness and immediately think it is all woo-who…and will make disparaging comments and move on to the next they will judge.
Thankfully, there are others in the world—like you—who, when they hear there may be a better way of doing things they pause and think to themselves “hmmm, perhaps, maybe I could find out more about”…..whatever the topic is. In this case the topic would be mindfulness.
As the title stated our mindsets are the starting point for most everything and the two different types of mindsets are growth mindset and fixed mindset.
The people who judge a topic and move on to the next are closed minded or as Carol Dweck would say they have a “fixed” mindset. They already believe there is nothing better or that things (themselves included) cannot be changed.
[to test your mindset just to be sure head on over here and take the online quiz. http://www.mindsetonline.com/testyourmindset/step1.php
If you are reading this you are probably a growth minded person but there could be a few fixed mindset people trying to shed their mindset and oh how I hope I can help you to at least stop judging yourself so harshly for now and then as you soften up on yourself you will find you are not so rigid, after all OR perhaps you have been hearing others around you talk of this mindfulness and you have decided to check it out in hopes of finding what a bunch of hooey it is
Whatever your reasons, I am glad you are here. I can only give you my perspective so you will have to decide for yourself. 
I was personally unaware –you will get this pun in a few- of this thing called mindfulness because I was not paying as close attention to my life as I now wish I would have. But-thanks to mindfulness I can let those thoughts go and cut myself a break (and as well as avoid ‘guilt’ by judging myself about my lack of awareness) because you see mindfulness is really about becoming more aware. It’s paying attention to what’s happening in the present, not hurrying to get to through the day only to wonder what just happened and then without thought, either turn on the TV to keep the noise of the day going and eat whatever gets in your path or to start chugging beers or sipping a drink to try and forget about the stress of the day. It’s seeing things like TV for what it is, entertainment not an outlet for a running judgmental commentary about how awful the shows are and the nit picking that you get sucked into because you pretty much are just miserable.
So how does one begin their journey into mindfulness? One breath at a time that’s how. Simple, yes but sometimes we look for more complicated measures by which to alleviate our distress. Something as simple as standing still and concentrating on our breathing may feel like nothing but that is the powerful magic of mindfulness. In those breaths we begin to calm down and allow ourselves to become more aware. With better awareness we now have our attention in a direction that is more beneficial to our thought processing and we are now able to make better decisions.
The third component is giving up the judging or at least doing a whole lot less of it. What kind of judging am I talking about? The kind that puts things and people into the category of good or bad. Nothing is all good or bad it just is. There will be things or people in our live that we find outside of our values and we might struggle to not judge and instead just let them be. Of course we can make choices about putting ourselves in situations where there is potential for conflict or if it is unavoidable, we can practice our breathing and bring our attention to the positives remembering that no one or thing is all bad.
Oh and if direction we took turns out to be not quite the correct one don’t get fixated on the fact that it wasn’t the answer just then, try to be open to the possibilities of other ways and then take another deep breath and head off another way—the more mindful way!
Leave a Reply