Using Your Mental Addictions as a Key to Practice Mindfulness Anywhere and Anytime
We all have mental addictions; it is the self talk that we do all day long unconsciously.
Mindfulness activities help a person to enjoy his life by bringing his mind completely in the present (now) moment, setting a few hours for meditation helps a person to get more control over his thoughts but for a man living in today’s fast moving world it is hard to focus on the present moment or making mindfulness a way of living the life when he is busy in his daily routine.
Our problem is the addictive thought patterns that takes all the space in our mind, for example a person who is driving his car is engaged in thinking about the upcoming project in his office or worrying about his kids in the school, he becomes aware and conscious only when there is a need to slow down or push the brake suddenly.
The more you are able to escape your mental addictions and become aware of what you are doing now, the easier the life gets.
The Rational Thinking Mind
We have a certain set of programming patterns according to which we interpret our world and our rational mind is always engaged in arranging everything in our mind to be in accordance with that particular pattern, these are the mental addictions that we should consciously work on in order to live peacefully.
For example, if your mental programing wants others to treat you nicely and someone behaves rudely with you,it violates your inner set of rules that strongly wants others to treat you well and then the mental chattering of hating that person begins, all day long you will have self talks like “how can he behave like this to me?”, “Who in the world do he think he is”, these kind of self talk is not rare, with just a little awareness of your thoughts you will realize that your mind is engaged in such useless chattering every now and then.
How to Use these Mental Addictions to Practice Mindfulness?
One of the biggest advantages of personal development activities is that once a person starts to become aware of the workings of his own mind, then he can use those thinking patterns for his own inner nourishment.
These mental addictions can be used as an alarm to practice mindfulness, how wise it will be to convert a bad habit into something that helps you to grow spiritually.
Following guidelines will help you to practice mindfulness at work, home or any place when you get stressed due to various personal issues.
4 Steps to Use Your Mental Addictions for Practicing Mindfulness:-
1-Become aware of your inner workings:-
With a little caution about how you get trapped in the negative self talk you can recognize the mental programs that cause you such troubles.
Make a habit to keep a watch on your feelings, any negative feeling like doubt, resentment, anger or disappointment will indicate that you are trapped in a negative self talk.
2-Find the root cause of the negative self talk:-
Awareness of your own thinking will make you realize that most of your mental chattering has a similarity that points towards one main inner programming of your mind.
For example self talks like “what an idiot that guy is to drive his car like this“,”people don’t care about others”, “this guy should know traffic rules” etc points towards an inner programming of yours that wants everybody to be more responsible..However it seems to be an obvious good intention, but you cannot change the world and such mental programs only causes your own loss of serenity.
3-Work towards improving your inner programming:-
During your meditation hours, work on your inner programming by guiding yourself with positive statements that could balance your inner negative beliefs.For the above example statements like “the world is perfect as it is” would do good.
There are numerous ways to alter these inner set of instructions, but here our focus is on mindfulness…so let’s move on to the final and the most important step.
4-Practicing Mindfulness using these mental addictions:-
Now, once you have identified your current mental addiction just set an intention that you will remind yourself to practice mindfulness when you see that you are getting caught in the type of mental chattering that you have now recognized with a little self analysis.
Just shift your attention to the happenings of the present moment by pulling yourself out of these useless self talks and use mindfulness techniques.
Doing this will fulfil two important purposes:-
1-You will be free of your mental addiction
2-You will enjoy your life by being completely present in the NOW moment.
I hope you liked this post. I would love to hear your views about this so please do leave me a comment in the box below.
You can also send me your queries using the contact page.
