How to Use Mindfulness To Add More Positivity Into Your Life

Our daily routines are full of struggles, many of which are strong enough to zap our energy and enthusiasm. When that happens, it keeps us from dreaming big and achieving our dreams. Mindfulness can circumvent that by connecting us to the present moment. This can, in turn, awaken our awareness of what’s positive about the moment, which allows us to become more growth-minded.

Commit to cultivating the five mindfulness habits we discussed in the last blog post. If you do, you are likely to excel. This is because mindfulness can help you sculpt your desired life by helping you become more positive and present-focused.

In this blog post,  I will show you how to channelize the power of mindfulness to make your life more positive and meaningful.

#: Befriend yourself

Jon Kabat-Zinn, a mindfulness expert, and the creator of the Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction Technique (MBSR), once said:

“Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves and our experience.”

In daily our lives, we often nurture self-sabotaging behaviors by becoming overly critical of ourselves.

We:

• Engage in negative self-talk
• Don’t believe in ourselves,
• Limit our potential
• And never try to find out what we are good at or desire subliminally

These failures keep us from being who we truly wish to be and living our dreams.

Mindfulness can help you escape this misery by training you to become:

• Aware of yourself
• Attentive to your needs
• And reflective of your thoughts, emotions, and aspirations

It can help you discover your talents and potentials help you focus on being kind with yourself. Doing all that can help you to cultivate an optimistic and growth-oriented attitude.

As you may well know, such an attitude can help you live a better, fuller, and more positive and prosperous life.

#: Treat bygones as bygones

Rehashing the past comes very easy for many of us. This explains why we often spend a significant part of our day wallowing in misery about what happened. We hold onto our mistakes, lament over our failures, and treat our setbacks as death sentences. Because of it, we struggle to move on and recognize the new opportunities life brings our ways.

Fortunately, mindfulness can help us fix this dilemma.

When you endeavor to become mindful of the present, you understand and accept that the past is a bygone. You learn to make your peace with the past and take whatever happened as an experience. This acceptance allows you to focus on the present and move forward towards positivity, growth, and better opportunities.

#: Focus on solutions, not the problem

Instead of focusing on an appropriate solution, somehow, slipping up draws our mind’s attention to the problem. When that happens, we end up fretting over what happened. That happens because we ignore the present and instead fixate on past and future concerns.

Nurturing mindfulness equips you with the positivity you need to combat this problem. This is because it teaches you how to take life from one moment to another.

When a mishap happens, focus less on the spilled milk and more on cleaning the mess.

Doing otherwise reduces your productivity and leaves you nurturing a sour attitude towards life.

When you practice mindfulness as part of your daily life, you start treating every experience as transitory. Whenever you encounter a setback in life, you embrace it and the emotions you experience as a result. Then focus on learning from it and finding an ideal solution. This attitude turns you into a more robust, positive, and resilient person. As a result, you resiliently power through every challenge and obstacle life throws at you.

#: Nurture gratitude and acknowledge your blessings

Jack Kornfield, a bestselling author, and Vipassana meditation teacher, once beautifully said:

“The things that matter most in our lives are not fantastic or grand. They are moments when we touch one another.”

Every day is a blessing that holds chances and moments of joy, beauty, and gratitude for you. You only have to be willing to see it. Your childhood memories are waiting to smile at you. Fond memories of your partner holding your hand are waiting for your recognition. The thought of something nice happening at your workplace is waiting to bring a smile to your face.

Your life is full of many beautiful moments that are waiting for you to recognize them. Unfortunately, most of us live our lives robotically, jumping from one task to the other automatically. In this pursuit, we focus mostly on material gains.

What’s funny is that we fail to achieve many of them because we are not focused on the present. We focus more on what we don’t have. And because of it, we nurture a complaining attitude that keeps us from living in the present moment. When we do this, we knowingly face the shadows and then complain of never seeing the light. That happens because we fail to nurture gratitude.

Mindfulness teaches you to embrace the present moment, focus on the positives, and acknowledge your blessings. As you consciously tune into the present moment, you become aware of the many gifts this moment has for you.

Recognizing this and accepting what you have makes you lively, happy, and content with your life. As you become calmer and more settled, you stop whining about what you don’t have. Instead, you use gratitude to strive towards excellence in all areas of your life.

#: Accept your emotions and perceive things for what they are

Our perception is usually a result of our preconceived notions.

Because you “don’t like someone,” even if he/she does a great job, you may consider all of his/her efforts worthless.

Since you “feel betrayed” by a particular friend, you may stop paying attention to his/her positive criticism.

Because you have labeled anger a “bad emotion,” whenever you experience it, you may become overly critical of yourself.

What you don’t know is that you may miss an opportunity to learn and reflect so as to be better.

A judgmental and unaccepting attitude does not take you very far in life. It makes you stagnant and bitter, both of which are detrimental to your positivity, wellbeing, and growth.

Mindfulness can help you overcome this challenge.

It does that by helping you nurture nonjudgmental acceptance of everything. In other words, it enables you not to let preconceived notions cloud your judgment regarding your emotions, experiences, people, and ideas.

When you nurture mindfulness, gradually, you develop the ability to analyze an experience from different angles. And in so doing, you understand its true nature and accept everything for what it is without labeling it good/bad.

This understanding can help you make your peace with your emotions. It also can help raise your emotional intelligence and develop the ability to analyze everything objectively. Having this optimistic attitude helps you grasp good opportunities, learn more from people and experiences, and love yourself better.

Mindfulness has the power to transform your life. However, you have to embrace it and nurture its habituation in your daily life. By doing so, you will become more positive, calmer, happier, and more content, even as you work towards self-betterment. The next blog post will help you to learn that.