Are you ZONING out again
Time to get out of autopilot and back into the present moment.
Are You Zoning Out Again?
When you’re not paying attention to anything in particular, what’s going on in the brain?
Turns out, it’s most likely going through the motions; probably thinking of something from the past or into the future.
Let’s face it, it’s hard to ALWAYS be present, in the moment.
Unless we’ve mastered our mind, to live in complete engagement & awareness of the here & now can seem very difficult.
Especially with all that we have going on our lives, there is a tendency for our minds to be clouded with thoughts a great deal of the time.
And because we’re so busy with so much to do, and because we’re running late, and we’re trying to meet deadlines….a lot of the “not so important” stuff we do throughout our days go unnoticed.
So most of the time, we’re unaware of such activities that come automatic to us.
For instance,
Do you remember drinking your coffee this morning?
What about your drive to work/ or whatever destination you drove to today…do you remember the ride there?
And how about your shower….can you recall the experience of what it felt like to feel the water touch your body?
This lack of awareness can be experienced as being on autopilot.
“…Because we’re so busy with so much to do, and because we’re running late, and we’re trying to meet deadlines….a lot of the “not so important” stuff we do throughout our days go unnoticed.”
Mindfulness encourages us to intentionally disengage from autopilot & brings our full awareness back to the here & now. By doing this, we’re able to fully experience everything we do with absolute intention & attention.
So you may be probably thinking now…okay what’s the big deal? I don’t need to really be present in doing those things mentioned. I’ll be okay…
If that’s something you thought, well you’re right. We don’t need to be aware of those things. And it very well may not even pose a problem in our lives.
However…
A problem exist when our autopilot way of thinking involves our emotions.
When we’re on autopilot, it becomes easy to slip into one of those not so good feeling “moods.” If we’re not paying attention, we may eventually find that our mood ends up slipping into another mood after the other, spiraling us into a state of depression. Then we’re wondering how or why we got here.
Stick around because in this email, we’ll dive deeper into this topic & not only will I share some tips you can implement today to rid this way of being for good, but I’ve also included other valuable material for you too.
Enjoy my friend.
Here’s the LOC breakdown for you to PREVIEW what you’re getting in this email (at a glance):
Mindful Insights
(1) Swap your body with a friend, change your sense of self—an experiment you gotta hear about. (2) feel good art video I found on Facebook to hopefully put a smile on your face. (3) Seated guided meditation practice
Mindful Weekly Challenge
(Below you’ll find a link to a PDF with 6 simple mindfulness exercises you can try out to help you be more present in your daily life)
Mindful Approach
(Continuing on with automaticity & mindfulness —we wrap this section up & I also touch on some of the pitfalls (or issues) that come up when it comes to a meditation practice and what we can do to overcome that.
Mindful Reflection
(A few closing thoughts I‘d like to share with you)
Mindful Insights
1) Swap Your Body With A Friend Experiment
Our sense of who we are is thought to be influenced by things like our childhood experiences, our interactions with others, and now, researchers say, our bodies.
A study that appeared August 26 in the journal iScience showed that, when pairs of friends swapped bodies in a perceptual illusion experiment, their beliefs about their own personalities became more similar to their beliefs about their friends' personalities.
This finding shows when our mental self-concept doesn't match our physical self, our memory can become impaired.
To work out the experiment, the team from the Brain, Body, and Self Laboratory led by Henrik Ehrsson found pairs of friends, outfitted them with googles showing live feeds of the other person's body from a first-person perspective.
To further the illusion, the researchers threatened one of the friend's body with a prop knife and found that the participant broke out into a sweat as if they were the one being threatened.
What I found especially interesting about this experimental finding is that who we “think” we are has the ability to shift quickly.
So then for people that suffer from depression, (individuals who often have very rigid and negative beliefs about themselves which can be devastating to their everyday functioning) If you change this illusion of how they perceive themselves slightly, it could potentially make those beliefs less rigid and less negative.
To learn more about this, you can find the FULL article — HERE.
2) Street Art Video
Art is powerful. It has the potential to influence our lives in so many ways. It helps us to see things differently & to also get us to tap into our imagination, which can impact, inspire, & even motivate positive change.
When I saw this video on Facebook, I thought it was so unique to see someone put their creative artistic skills to the test in the way that they did. It’s street art taken to the next level. It’s def a must watch if you’re looking to shed a little smile :)
link — Street Art Video
3) Seated Guided Meditation
Here is a seated guided meditation practice I created for you that can help to bring more awareness into the present moment and away from an autopilot way of being.
Mindful Challenge
The present moment can be a beautiful place to arrive at. The PDF below offers 6 exercises (though there are many more ways) to help you be in the here & now with full awareness:
PDF— 6 mindfulness exercises.pdf
Mindful Approach
Mindfulness is the opposite of autopilot.
It is awareness, it is a few deep breaths, it is being in the present moment. To be mindful is to let go of the past and to stop worrying about the future, if only for a brief moment.
Mindfulness is slowing down.
Mindfulness will not change the things in our life; it will change our life by helping us notice the things in it with a new perspective.
The goal of sharing this information of automaticity with you, and bridging it over from last week, is to help you clarify the relationship between mindfulness & our autopilot ways of being & how important it is to understand.
Because if we continue not recognizing or paying mindful attention to our automatic reactions and routine patterns of thinking and behaving, it will continue to create a negative impact on our lives, leaving us to feel & live like mindless zombies.
The mindfulness practices, exercises, & challenges that I’ve provided up until this point all aid as beneficial tools to use to help de-automate our unhealthy, dis-serving habits or patterns of living, leaving us room for choice.
Creating a daily mindfulness practice also helps us to reduce the automatic process of stereotyping & judging others.
If you participated in the activity I offered last week, “Walking Down The Street,” you probably noticed something within your thoughts—It tends to automatically make up stories.
Through cultivating full awareness into your experiences, noting your automatic ways of thinking, feeling, and reacting, you’d be able to change the narrative of the story your mind is creating, rid the judgement, and be more at peace with yourself.
By turning attention back to the present moment, to the feeling, you create room for insight.
And so given all that you know now, what would it be like to practice along the seated guided meditation practice that I provided here for you with new eyes? See if you can practice along with full awareness & non judgment. And just notice what happens.
3 Common Issues (with meditation):
The mind just doesn’t shut up. It’s always busy lost in thought. 🤯
—this is ofcourse a common pitfall of meditation. What may be important to note here is that there is no need to even try to quiet the mind. In meditation, we aren’t trying to quiet our thoughts or to not think. We are simply trying to NOTICE our thoughts. Become aware. And when we do this, we now have a choice to ruminate in those thoughts, believe them to be true, or just watch them come and then watch them go.I get sleepy 😴
—if you get sleepy, you’re most likely tired. And that’s okay. If you feel sleepy, skip the meditation and get some rest. Come back to it, when you feel awake & alert. If this still doesn’t help, try sitting up a little straighter while practicing. Lengthen you’re inhales just a bit. Try meditating with your eyes open with a soft gaze down in front of you. Try changing the time of the day you meditate. Or try a walking meditation.
I get bored 🥱
—this will happen, often. And this is no problem. We aren’t trying to feel any particular way in meditation. We are simply trying to notice what it is we feel in this moment. So if you feel bored, gently & kindly take notice what boredom feels like for you. What sensations do you feel while experiencing boredom? What happens to your thoughts when you get bored? Wouldn’t it be nice to be comfortable with boredom so that when it happens out in our real life, we don’t immediately go grab for a distraction (food/alcohol/social media)?
** Next week is all about our judgemental mind and how applying mindfulness to our daily life can help to rid our habits of judging ourselves and others. **
Mindful Reflection
Again, I want to thank you so much for signing up for this newsletter. It means so much to me knowing other ppl out there value what I have to offer.
For so many years I struggled with my own thoughts & feelings. I lived with limiting beliefs, I used to have low self worth & low confidence, I used to think that my thoughts and feelings didn’t matter. It was a REAL struggle.
And because I used to feel and live and think this way, it prevented me from ever breaking free and growing into my true authentic self.
It took a collection of things to happen, as well as time, to really wake me up from this state of being. It took life to really hit me, for me to see that I was not fully living.
After realizing something wasn’t right, I took on therapy, learned some tools, and started to shift to the life I was meant to live—the life I live now.
It wasn’t easy ofcourse. So much inner work had to be done. And even still today, I’m much happier and feel a lot more free but I still struggle with things from time to time. But that’s okay. Because I know everything that happens in our lives has the potential to make or break us, and in whichever way it turns, it is us who creates it.
So knowing that, I’m choosing to perceive my life and everything that happens in it, as a means to make me and guide me towards my true and full highest self.
I’m so humbled and so grateful to have you here, to not only learn more about the benefits of mindfulness but also to explore and experience my life journey along the way. Love you my friend.
until next week,
NAMASTE.
** BTW I just found out you can reply to these emails directly. And that excites me lol. Im always down to chat & go over anything I covered, any mindfulness or meditation questions, or simply just connect & get to know you more. If that’s something you’d like to do, feel FREE and just respond to the email(s).
***ALSO, if you haven’t already you can join the private group on FB where we can get conversations going & talk about important & meaningful topics or ideas as it relates to us or the world. Plus, I’d rather talk too you, not at you.
So come talk to me.
I’m Victor.
Or the mindfulness guy.
I aim to find calm & balance in my life through inspirations between alternative Eastern traditional Buddhism styles of meditation & mindfulness, as well as modern secular styles too.
I believe that we ALL have the capacity to create greatness for ourselves & I’m willing to show you how.
you can find me hanging out on:
Instagram —@2whomitmayconcrn_
Facebook — @iamzenrn
TikTok — @iamzenrn
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~I’m here to hold space for you because you deserve it.~
Victor Padilla