There’s a lot happening in the news, and with a coronavirus, that’s making life really difficult, so I wanted to do a few different articles this time and share with you six mindfulness tools that I use in my life to create a little bit of balance and make it a little easier to navigate through the times we’re going through right now. I wanted to share those tools with you, so hopefully you might be able to use one or two of them to create a little peace and harmony as you go about your life.
So let’s just talk a little bit about mindfulness now. Mindfulness for me is really just taking the time out to breathe, pause, and take stock of where I am and what I’m doing to be conscious of what I’m doing. It’s so easy to be time-starved and scheduled from one thing to the next day after day after day to never really take stock and be aware of your surroundings, how you’re feeling, and what you’re doing.
So the six things that I’m going to share with you today are really different types of tools that I use and that you might be able to use in order to create a little bit of a higher level of mindfulness in your day. So with that, let’s just get right into it.
1. Timeout
What timeout is it? It’s really simple. it’s essentially a timer that you can set on your computer to kind of darken or obscure your screen after a particular period of time there are all sorts of different parameters and preferences that you can set for it and it’s for you know different time periods and different Cadence’s in the day and when your screen starts to kind of softly fade away as time out makes it so you can postpone it.
if you want so it’s not incredibly obnoxious and the fact that you can’t if you’re caught up actually in something that you really have to do that you can’t delay it for a moment but I found that timeout is really an amazing little app and it’s free but you can also contribute and I’ve contributed to the author of this app because it’s been so helpful to me and one of the things that’s been really helpful to me on is that.
I’ve had some repetitive stress injuries in my life and my arm from you know computer overworked and mouse work and stuff like that and so timeout really helps me kind of take a pause it’s very easy for me to work hours straight and my computer if I’m really deep into doing something and so time out forces me by obscuring my screen slowly.
And making me conscious of the fact that I haven’t gotten up and moved in a half-an-hour or I haven’t stretched my arm or I haven’t you know do my strengthening exercises and it’s been really helpful for me to kind of be very conscious of my physical well-being
2. Meditation App
It’s a meditation app, and essentially, it’s a meditation timer. You can set it for a particular period of time, and then it can accompany your meditation with music or a voiceover—a guided meditation of a person talking. I find it to be very simple; it’s very poetic, and how the user interface is laid out is very intuitive. It’s free, and it’s just an amazing little app.
I use it to meditate almost every day, and sometimes I only have five minutes, sometimes I have 20 minutes, sometimes I want to go for longer, sometimes I want to just meditate with a little bit of music, sometimes I want to meditate with nothing, and you can set it up.
It’s got all sorts of preferences, so you can get it to give you a little chime in the beginning, a little time halfway through, and a little tone at the end so you get a sense of the time and where you are in your meditation. I think it’s from a tremendously cool little app, and I highly recommend it to you now.
3. Book
It’s a book by a guy named Eckhart Tolle. It’s called The Power of Now. When I was burning out in my last gig in corporate America, I came across this book as part of a book club that I was part of, and it changed my life. Eckhart Tolle is really one of the owners of the schools of thought of mindfulness of staying in the now dozens.
Hundreds of self-help books have been written using Eckhart Tolle’s philosophies, but this is the seminal original book on that idea, so I highly recommend you read Power Up Now. It can be a game-changing experience in how it can teach you to mindfully control your thought patterns so you don’t go into repetitive cycles of stressful thinking or negative thinking, so I can’t recommend this book.
4. Yoga
I want to recommend to you is actually right here on a YouTube channel called Yoga with Adriene Adrian has millions of followers and hundreds of videos that she’s put out I’ve been watching her yoga videos for years and she’s really authentic she’s really gentle she has that many followers for a reason and if you’ve ever been curious about using yoga or starting to get into some sort of a yoga practice to improve your well-being both mental and physical yoga with Adriene is a great place to start I’m not being compensated for this I am NOT an affiliate in any way shape or form I am just sharing this channel with you because yoga I have found is really great for your physical well-being your energy levels your psychological well-being and as a creative I found that yoga really enhances and de-stresses my life so I recommend it to you so check out yoga with Adriene now.
5. Drawing
I want to recommend another book for creatives. It’s called The Zen of Seeking Drawing as Meditation. I read this book when I was in undergraduate school, and my drawing instructor used it to develop a number of exercises and techniques that we used in a figure drawing class.
It was absolutely transformational in how it helped me see things in a different way. Now the Zen part comes into it in the fact that Zen is the art of no ma I know it gets very woo-woo; it could take an hour and a half of video to really describe it, and then in a way it almost can’t be described.
But the idea and the concept of the philosophy of Zen as it relates to drawing is a very beautiful and interesting marriage, and this book does an amazing job of describing it and helping you see it in different ways, so as a creative if you do any kind of artwork drawing sketching, I highly recommend you check out the Zen of seeing; it will really change and transform how you go about what you do when you draw.
6. Sketchbook
Sketchbook wants to share with you for creatives a sketchbook and a pencil. I happen to like mechanical pencils; this one is from Paper Mate. I’ve used these for decades. It’s really great because you don’t have to carry a sharpener. There’s an eraser attached. It’s really long. You don’t have to carry anything but these two things, and I found throughout my entire career that the best mindfulness tool that I have is to sketch.
It stops me from going from one meeting to the next. It stops me from thinking in repetitive ways. It stops me from going through cycles of negativity. It stops me from going through cycles of stressful thinking. It kind of pulls me into a world that is entirely my own. You can doodle, you can draw representationally, you can sketch out ideas, and you can write. There are so many things that you can do with just a pencil in a sketchbook.
It’s actually one of the best mindfulness tools that I use, and I recommend that you use it to be mindful of what you do. It’s old-school. It’s tactile; it’s physical; you can actually keep it; you can carry it with you; it’s permanent; it’s invisible sketchbooks. Rock, and so if you aren’t using a sketchbook, I recommend that you get one and that you use it. It will change your life, and it is one of the deepest, most visceral, and most important mindfulness tools in my life, and I wish that for you now before we go.