Functional Mindfulness

It's the first day of our New Year--a perfect time to begin a resolution that many of us vowed to incorporate into our lives this year:  Practicing Mindfulness to improve and enrich our lives.

Mindfulness is meant to make us more aware of what is happening in the moment, to increase our receptiveness to the sensory world around us and focus upon the activity we're engaged in right now.  Thinking only about the person we're speaking to, feeling the lightness of snowflakes on our face while we walk the puppy, observing the relaxation in our shoulders and smell of the cinnamon as we knead the dough to make a family favorite for the holidays.

It's about purposely performing tasks, whether they are human interactions, daily chores or creative feats.  Listening to a child jabber at bedtime being as precious of a moment as working a potter's wheel.

Mindfulness for daily chores--really?  Here's an example from my life:

Despite my love of organization I've been a purse stuffer all my life. Every outing results in my purse arriving home crammed with receipts, notes or library due date slips.  Although my car is set-up to function as my "second" purse, with nail files, toll change, writing paper and other necessities I still end up with a mess in my purse.  This results in many quickly-scribbled to-do's being forgotten and receipts that scarcely make it to the family bill-paying pile.

The way I cope with this recurrent character flaw is to practice Mindful Purse Cleaning Cleansing.  Several times a week everything is dumped out onto the counter, reviewed and organized, then returned to a specific spot in my purse.  When you carry two cameras and three pair of glasses like I do, everything must have it's own place for easy retrieval.

This allows me to find notes to myself before their action time expires.  I can pull out receipts and file them in the home office.  Church bulletins and expired coupons can be recycled.  Going through my purse helps me remember what I was thinking about when I purchased an item, or scribbled the name of a book someone recommended--it's still fresh in my brain.

Have you been watching the series, The Crown?  I noticed that toward the end of Season 2 the Queen is carrying a purse quite often.  Seemingly unrelated, I re-watched the movie, Wonder Woman, last week and was struck with how effectively she used her shield.  Somehow, the Queen's purse and WW's shield combined in my brain and I thought, they're both their weapons.

Quite a shield, eh?

Well, my purse is not my weapon, but it's function is to serve me.  It's my toolkit (think emery board and library card), my memory jogger (notepad and pen) and my security blanket (if I'm feeling insecure when I'm away from home I can squeeze it between my arm and body to bolster myself.)

Once, after an evening service and in a rush to get home, I left my purse on the chair in the sanctuary.  Arriving home I realized my mistake when a friend called to say they had found the purse and put it in the church's office.  Hanging up the phone I suddenly thought, "Oh, no--they had to search it to find my ID--what else did they see?"  Must not have been anything scandalous or too personal, because we're still friends twenty years later.

If you're wondering how to start incorporating Mindfulness into your life you don't have to wait to sign up for a yoga class or digest a book on the subject, try focusing on one everyday task and approaching it in a goal-driven way.  Each time I clean out my purse I tell myself that my goals are to 1) Make it lighter so it won't hurt my shoulder (only carry a few coins, take out the heavy stuff I don't need), 2) Stock it with things I often use when I'm away from home (charged camera, personal essentials), 3) Retrieve and act upon the "to-do's" that I thought were important at the time and 4) Make it easy, and non-embarrassing, to return to me if lost.

You might choose a more interpersonal daily activity for your initial Mindfulness practice.  Maybe you'll decide that you want to increase your appreciation of a person you relate to each day.  Choose a consistent time, maybe the first greeting of the day, to purposely think about their attributes that you appreciate the most.  You might try to name these attributes in your mind and recall them while you talk to the person.  Sounds weird, doesn't it?  Not so weird, just different from the usual way of doing things.

For folks who pray, you can pray for the person to increase in their God-given positive attributes.  Funny thing, as you pray for someone to grow in a positive direction you begin to notice more and more positive attributes that they have.

When I started hanging out with a college group of folks who wanted to learn about God and the Bible I was a little wary because I didn't know what to expect.  They were all friendly, to be sure, but oh, so plain.  Turns out that most of them were putting themselves through school and didn't have the extra funds to buy new clothes, buy Ultra Violet eye shadow or install 8-track players in their late model cars.

As the school year ended and we said our good-byes for the summer I noticed something unexpected.  The girls and guys had become so beautiful to me; their faces were alive, their eyes made such a clear connection with mine.  I had gotten to know them, to know their hearts; they were shining.

I think the current emphasis on Mindfulness practice is our world's attempt to reconnect to the beauty in our world and to each other's hearts.  In a few years there will be a new name for it.

As a child of the 60's, I call it Luv.