Spend 10 Minutes a Day on a Regular Mindfulness Practice



Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll urge you to take just 10 minutes a day for a regular mindfulness practice.
Meditation and mindfulness used to be thought of as a a little "woo woo" since they were well outside of mainstream practices.  In recent years of course, studies have found overwhelming evidence that mindfulness (generally) and meditation (specifically) can be beneficial to almost every part of our lives from our mental health, to our physical health, to our relationships.   
If you are interested in more information about the benefits of meditation, I would recommend Dan Harris's book "10% Happier."  Dan Harris is an news anchor with ABC and had a well documented panic attack on national television, which led to his own enlightenment.  His book is half memoir and half investigative journalism into the benefits of meditation.  The title refers to his view that regular meditation can make you about 10% happier.  It is the perfect book for the meditation skeptic.  I was a true believer once I finished it.  It seems that for our stress-levels, sleep patterns, and mental and physical health, we should all be meditating as regularly as we brush our teeth! 
The problem for me?  I'm not a great meditator.  It probably has something to do with my undisciplined ADHD Brain.  My mind totally races when I sit down for even a moment of silence. I started trying to meditate about 5 years ago.  I attend a Unitarian church and had signed up for a structured small group.  There were a couple of mandates for the group, but one of them was to choose and implement a "Daily Spiritual" practice.   Some people get weirded out by the word "spiritual," but I just think of it as a mindfulness practice.  I took the opportunity to try daily meditation, but there were a lot of creative ideas from the folks in my group.  Someone did a mindful journaling practice, another did creative drawing.  One did a daily gratitude email out to a group of friends and another did mindful healthy cooking!  I settled upon meditating, but I decided, rather than to just dive in on my own, that I would kick it off with an 8-week mindfulness boot camp -- kind of like one of those detox cleanses to kick off a diet.  I followed the plan in the book "Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World."  I'll include the links to all of these book recommendations in the notes section below.  It was a great introduction to mindfulness, meditation, and how to use these principles as tools to live a happier, more satisfied life.  
I'd like to tell you that I have it all figured out now and can sit in lotus position happily for hours at a time -- but then I would be straight up lying.  I struggle to quiet my brain for the reasons I already mentioned, but I have managed to keep up my daily meditating in one form or another for over 5 years.  It has taken some different forms over the years as I switch things up to keep things interesting or to accommodate new ideas.  I've meditated to music, used guided meditation, practiced mindful hair drying (this didn't last very long, since it was a transparent attempt on my part to kill two birds ineffectively with one stone), and did daily mindful nature walks with my dog.  Now I'm doing static Egoscue exercises (which basically require me to lay down in different poses) while I listen to guided meditation through the Insight Timer app.  I've determined that my brain does better when being told what to do rather than being allowed to run wild with silence or music.  There are a bunch of meditation apps that have guided meditations -- some people like Headspace which has a monthly fee, I like Insight Timer, but there are others like Stop, Breathe & Think.  Almost all of them organize the meditations by category, so you can pick what you want to concentrate your meditation on.  
I've definitely received some benefits from this regular practice.  It helps me to lead life more intentionally and gives me an excuse to just "do nothing" for 10-15 minutes a day.  I'm blessed with good brain chemistry, so I'm not sure how much it boosts my life satisfaction, but it's almost certainly not hurting!  If meditating isn't your speed, I'll also include a link to a book that gives lots of other ideas for daily spiritual practices.  10 minutes a day is not much sacrifice for something that pays such clear health and lifestyle dividends.  Let me know what YOU think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching.
Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World - https://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-Eight-Week-Finding-Peace-Frantic-ebook/dp/B005NJ2T1G

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