#challenge30days - Mindfulness: road to enlightenment (3/30) - 30 Days blogging/meditation streak

This is part of the 30 days writing challenge by @dragosroua. I combined this with a mindfulness challenge. My goal with this is to improve writing & english skills as well as becoming more self aware.

What is mindfulness anyway? Is it just thinking a lot? Minding your business? No..

Mindfulness is being aware of what you do and what is going on around you. And one might think that this is an easy task to do, but once tried, we often find out that we are easily distracted by our own thoughts. This shows the exercise i talked about yesterday. Just trying to focus on the breathing is step one to acknowledge that, and at the same time to train the mind to free it self from said thoughts.

One might ask himself:

Why should i stop my thoughts? Thinking is good right?

Yes, thinking can be good, but lets be honest. 95% of all thoughts we have through the day are random. Maybe about conversations we will never have, or things we could have done differently. By doing this, we focus on the future or the past. We forget that we actually live in the NOW.

The mindfulness killer

This might be different from person to person, but my number one distraction is the smartphone. It pulls away my focus from the real world and instead i will find myself aimlessly scrolling through < insert social media app of choice > . This is why i ditch my phone as often as possible, and often leaving it at home when i go to work or to school. Since doing that i made an interesting observation:

90% of the people on the train is either on their phone, or are reading papers. Hardly anybody is having a conversation. I feel almost like a misfit for not being on the phone ;)

Having said that, i encourage YOU to try it out, and ditch your phone for one day. Observe the world, but also observe yourself. You will most likely crave your smartphone, and as well you will recognizing how distracted the everybody has become by their phone.

Thanks for reading, and stick around for my next #challenge30days post tomorrow :)