So glad to find this thread. I practice mindfulness and meditation regularly and I'm going through the activities posted here to try too.
During mindfulness session today, I had a reality beautiful insight and felt drawn to share it here.
What I've been carrying around thinking is a burden, is actually my greatest strength 🥹🥲
In the context of past trauma memories or the challenges faced, I'm able to see them as a strength now and something that has led me to become a person who can relate, empathise and share in other's vulnerability.
@Shasan💗 that's an amazing insight to have found today.
It's incredibly powerful to be able to recognise the strengths in the struggle, and it reminds me of these two tracks, I hope you don't mind me sharing them with you...
The reference to having an "elastic heart" that is born from trauma really resonates for me, as I hope it does for you 😊
I wanted to share a mindfulness activity that I've been trying the last few mornings. And I don't know about you, but I certainly have a very slow wake-up in the mornings. This is a nice, slow way to ease into the day.
Soooo...it's all about mindfully waking up . And here are the steps
Wake up and move your body into a comfortable position
Stretch out each part of your body, starting at your toes and slowly moving up to your hands as you stretch out
As you move through each part of your body, just notice how each part feels
Inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth for 1 minute
Once you've finished, start your day and maybe repeat at bed time!
Thank you so much to everyone who last week joined in on our morning mindfulness activity. To be honest, I kept forgetting 😅 but that's ok. It just means that activity was not right for me.
So, for today, I just wanted to share a resource! In the past, I've LOVED the Headspace App. But it's quite expensive and definitely not accessible to all of us! And I recently discovered that they have a youtube where they have full length sleep meditations and some great 5(ish) minute long videos. Click here to access their youtube.
For me, I used to use sleep meditations to sleep and every so often, my sleep problems come up again. I always fall back to headspace for this!
Let me know in this thread if you've found this useful!
Acknowledging the experiences that can make mindfulness harder for us to engage with:
We would like to acknowledge that mindfulness is not for everyone and can feel distressing for people living with a history of trauma. We invite you to participate in this if you feel comfortable to, and take from it what you like. You know you and what works for you best
Some helpful things to remember when practicing mindfulness is to exercise your right to choose and only do what feels right for you, take breaks, and make an external anchor point, such as a sound instead of the internal world, if that is too overwhelming for you. Sometimes opening your eyes and focusing on an external object can be helpful. You can find more information about this here https://davidtreleaven.com/
