Latest / RiseUp - Live Joy Your Way / Ep. 20 – Mindfulness

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Ep. 20 – Mindfulness · RiseUp - Live Joy Your Way

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Today's episode is produced by my friends at Walk West.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: If you're looking to grow your brand and generate leads through podcast or video production, head over to walkwest.com.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's start the show.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Rise Up.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Live Joy Your Way with Comedy Wood.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's time to step into your power.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Hi everybody, and welcome to another episode of Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: I am Comedy Wood, and for those of you who do not know me, I am a certified life coach that works with individuals on healing that relationship with yourself so that you can stop outsourcing your self-worth, define success and happiness for yourself, and honestly, so that you can live joy your way.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Today I wanted to talk about the topic of mindfulness.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: This actually came up yesterday when I was uh guesting on someone else's podcast, and we were we were just talking about uh self-care and mindfulness came up, and and the host actually mentioned how mindfulness, the term mindfulness and mindful seems to be batted around a lot lately, but not everybody understands the benefits or the aspects of what mindfulness or practice of mindfulness can cultivate.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I wanted to talk about that a little bit today, especially in the vein of trying to cultivate joy for yourself and how you you see happiness for yourself.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: So when I routinely refer to mindfulness, I often talk about how we as humans, especially as high achievers, will tend to, you know, have the list of things to do and we're on autopilot and we're kind of checking boxes, and mindfulness really brings us to this point of just being in our present moment.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's not about thinking about the past and solving or fixing the past because truthfully we can't actually go and undo anything in the past or fix it, it's done and it's over with, but we do as humans try to, we we live back there trying to figure out why things happened the way that they did.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, or we tend to future trip.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: And what I mean by that is we either start worrying about the future or solving problems of the future that haven't even occurred yet.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: So mindfulness is really this practice of coming into your present moment.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: You're here and now.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's a practice of allowing that space for the thoughts to settle, for the mind to calm down for a minute or two, and from that place being able to decide what your next best step forward is.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: So, really truthfully, it's about bringing your awareness to this present moment, but not just the present moment, it's about bringing it to the present moment without judgment, anger, fear.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's about just being you for the sake of you.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and when we do this, when we are able to really build a mindfulness practice, when we are being in that state of mindfulness, it allows this space for us to see how we can grow.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: It allows for that growth, those growth edges to really open up to us and see how we can grow as individuals.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: A few other aspects of mindfulness that I I just wanted to touch on was, you know, yes, the being mindful is about being fully present.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's about being, and and as you as you cultivate this practice, it becomes easier, where you're not necessarily jumping back in time into the past or jumping forward into the future.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's about really training yourself to just be here and now.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: The one one of the ways that I have talked about really being able to practice this is when you are attempting to become fully present.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that you can do is zone in and hone in on what your five senses are experiencing in that moment.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, it's it's it's about figuring out what I see in this moment, what do I hear in this moment, you know, what do I smell in this moment, what is the taste that I taste in this moment?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: What can I touch that's around me in this moment?
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: And when we do that and we really dial into what our five senses are experiencing, it brings us to this place of the here and now and allows all the other thoughts that were floating through our brain just this time to settle and just allow that space, that space to just be.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: And when we're able to do this more consistently, we start to see that we have the ability to actually see more clearly.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: And what I mean by that is we're able to recognize, for instance, feelings or emotions that we have more easily because we've allowed for the space to just be in the present moment without worrying about all the other things.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: It allows us to recognize what we're feeling.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: So, for instance, if we're feeling anxiety, it allows us to not only recognize it from an emotional level, but where we're feeling it in our body, and then from there we can start building and cultivating the ability to decide what is how we want to address the feeling that we're having, meaning, what is it trying to tell us, what's the need that we have, how do we want to meet that need?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: Another great aspect of mindfulness is when we build this practice and we have these spaces of being in the present moment, we start to be able to let go of judgment.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: It becomes, you know, because a lot of times we'll label our mind will go to labeling things as good or bad or right or wrong.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: And as we build this practice of mindfulness and build this space to just be and accept what is present, just accept that it's here without the label, it builds this concept of letting go of judgment.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: And again, letting go of judgment and just accepting yourself as you are, as the spiritual being, having this human experience and looking at things as ways of learning rather than right or wrong, that's one of the elements of self-compassion as well.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: So as you're building this practice of mindfulness and building this ability to let go of judgment, you're also starting a practice of self-compassion at the same time.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: It also builds the ability to just allow everything to belong, right?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: So in in conjunction with this letting go of judgment, it's also just allowing feelings, um uh thoughts, uh, emotions, experiences, it's just allowing everything to belong and allowing them to be there, accepting that they're there, and making space for understanding that you can take what you want from those things and decide how you would best like to move forward without having to say that you shouldn't feel some way or you shouldn't have a certain thought.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's allowing it to belong, and then from the place of grace and space, you're able to figure out how you would like to move forward from that place.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: It also a practice of mindfulness, as you start building that practice, it allows you to build this ability to be more patient with yourself.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, a lot of times we are under, you know, every day there's so many stressors that come at us, and there are times when we feel anger or we feel frustration, and it allows ourselves to become more patient with ourselves as human beings, but it also allows us to start moving to this place of process versus outcome, where we're not constantly focusing on the outcome of something, but actually being present and going through the process and learning through it, which allows us to learn how to be just be more patient with ourselves, that we don't have to get to that end result immediately, but we can allow ourselves to be in those growth edges, we can allow ourselves to acquire knowledge and get to where we're going without having to constantly feel like we're in this race, which leads me to another great aspect of it, which is just honoring yourself as this, as a as a human, that it's not about getting somewhere, you're not in a race, you know, you're it it's it's all about the journey of life and that life is happening through us and for us.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's about you know, when mindful, when we really get into this practice of mindfulness, we start to really honor ourselves as just doing the best we can with the information that we have.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it allows us to recognize that we're not in a race and that we we're we're we're moving forward, we're making our next best step forward when we give ourselves this time to really see and and take the time to uh be in our moments and decide what the next best step forward is for ourselves.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um I also wanted to talk about the benefits, right?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's great to think about okay, well, what what will I build with mindfulness?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: What comes with the practice?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: But it it's really important to also understand just the other benefits that we get from building a practice of mindfulness.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: I know that I personally, the uh one of the biggest ones for me is the reduction in stress.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: I know that for me it was I I would wake up each day and it was already this feeling of anxiety or stress about what had to get accomplished that day.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so I instituted a practice of mindfulness and just being in the present moment from the in the morning, a practice just right in the morning where that's how I start my day, just I'm here, I'm now, I'm I'm giving myself the space to just be me, which settles the mind.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so I didn't start my day with this anxiety about all the things that needed to be done.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: So definitely a great benefit of a mindfulness practice is the reduction in stress.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Another benefit that has been found through different studies is the improved uh improved memory and improved focus, and that's because uh when we practice mindfulness and we allow for um our mind to quiet down without the constant back and forth from the past to the future and just running all over the place, it allows our minds to to build this ability to focus more and also to remember things better.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um another great benefit of mindfulness are the physical benefits, right?
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: So things like better digestion, better immune system, lower blood lower blood pressure, um, the body's able to heal faster or there's less inflammation.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: Why is this?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: That and I've talked about this before where when we are constantly living in um a feeling of stress and overwhelm, and our body's constantly in that um high, high anxiety level, our physical body starts to feel the toll of it.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we will start to feel run down and things like that.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so we get to we get to have these physical benefits from a practice of mindfulness.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Another great benefit is we do end up sleeping better.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we have the ability to um another great benefit to a mindfulness practice is uh it does create the ability to solve problems easier.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Again, when we cultivate stillness in our mind, it helps us gain the ability to just see things in a new way.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: It allows for the space to have that creative and and um thinking flexibility to see the different perspectives and to work towards a solution when we're facing a problem.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then a couple other great aspects to mindfulness is there are fewer feelings of loneliness, improved self-esteem, and then of course mood regulation.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: So when we are able to uh allow ourselves this practice, right, during each and every day to have that quiet time, that that space to just be present in our moment, and we are able to allow the space to let any stress or anxiety or overwhelm kind of come back down, right?
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: We allow our our our um nervous system to calm down, it does allow the space for our moods to even out as well.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's when we sit in that high stress area or that constant go-go-go mentality that eventually it starts to wear us down, and it also negatively affects our moods, where we're we sometimes will end up being in this constant state of worry or or anger even, or this state of fear.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so it just allows us that practice as we cultivate it, it really does allow us uh the ability to start regulating the moods, and there aren't so many up and down swings.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: So these are just a few of the things that I wanted to bring up in terms of mindfulness.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: I will say that especially right now with what's going on in the world in general, there's so much uncertainty, there's so there's a lot of stress and overwhelm.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so I would highly recommend that if you haven't thought about a mindfulness practice as you are working on cultivating joy into your life, um, I would suggest thinking about this mindfulness practice or at least giving yourself some time each day to really just get present and give yourself that grace and space to let the thoughts settle and to not uh necessarily be worrying about the past or or, like I said before, future tripping and worrying about solving all the problems of the future that haven't even happened yet.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: If you would like support or would like to talk to me, feel free.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: You can find me on the web at www.comonywood.com, or you can always book a call with me at chatwithcomedy.com.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: And until next time, I'm Comedy Wood.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening to Rise Up.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Always remember your uniqueness and the gift that you bring to this world.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Life happens for you, not to you, I don't know.