Helping parents bring mindful space to their days during the COVID-19 pandemic — 5

All this week we’re featuring tips from Mindfulness Connected Learning, as part of #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek. The theme this week is Kindness.

Practice self-kindness to yourself by bringing stillness into your life and help to press a pause button before you respond.

Tip 5 — POP and Breathe Practice

This practice can be done in 30 seconds, 3 minutes, 30 minutes (whatever time you have available) and is a lovely practice to share with your children. It brings mindfulness into everyday life. It allows us to check in with ourselves and create a space where we can choose how to respond to ourselves and to our families.

Pause.

Open your senses and receive the present moment through the portal of your senses

Pay attention to what you can hear, then what you can see, smell, and the sensations in the body

Breathe — take a few breathes and follow the breath as you breathe in and out, get intimate with your own breathing

This is a grounding practice that builds our ‘strength on the inside’. It doesn’t always take away stress but it helps us to get a perspective on it and to ground ourselves in the present moment.

What happens is that we begin to get in the habit of checking in to see how are feeling, rather than letting the feelings of fear and anxiety build up…simply notice “I’m worried, relaxed, calm, anxious”, “What do I need right now?” Maybe it’s a cup of tea, a chat with a friend, to listen to music, to do some exercise…we can still do all these things to lift our spirits and get in touch with our joyful selves.

Our heartfelt thanks to Mindfulness Connected Learning for sharing tips on finding stillness this week — you can read the original article, and visit them at the website and Facebook page

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