Mindful and full mind

Mindful is a big buzzword now. It's part of meditation and living in the moment. Living more mindfully. Mindfulness was the topic of restorative yoga today. At one point the teacher said something about it being weird because the word is mindful and we're trying to empty our mind.

That got me thinking. What if we do what we often do in yoga and turn that upside down. Do an inversion with it. Look at it a different way. Maybe what makes the whole thing so difficult is the idea of emptying your mind. Maybe if we take the word at its word, we can make it seem easier. If we are joyful, we are full of joy. So if we want to be mindful, let's fill our minds.

Perhaps if we think about our minds being so full of the important things that there's no room for the non-important things, it will be easier to let thoughts that are anxiety producing and harmful float right out of our minds. There's just no room for them. Our mind is full. Sorry. No room in here for you bad thoughts. No room in here for you gossip. Sorry. No room in here for you negative thinking.

There's a story for time planning about rocks in a bucket where big rocks represent the important things to you and pebbles and sand the things that are less important and even not important at all or distractions. If you put the big rocks in first and then let the sand and pebbles fill in the rest of the bucket, you'll get more in than if you fill the bucket with the sand and pebbles and try to force the big rocks in afterward.

Maybe we can look at mindfulness like that. We can keep thinking about what's important to us and instead of trying to force out the not important stuff and empty the bucket of our mind, we can just keep filling our minds with the important stuff and then emptying our mind will happen more naturally. We will have an easy time doing the important things even if they aren't the most fun things. We won't be distracted.

When we're doing the dishes or doing laundry or making the bed or working out or any simple tasks that require our attention, we can give our full attention and let it give us so much joy because we know that it's an important thing to allowing us to live a full life that we have chosen.

So when we want to be mindful, we can ask ourselves, what is filling my mind right now? Is my mind full of important, useful, helpful, joyful things? Or is it full of negative, ruminating, wondering, denying, blaming things.

Instead of trying so hard to empty our minds, we can try to fill our minds with the right things and then our minds will naturally allow themselves to relax as they enjoy silently coexisting with those beautiful, joyful thoughts that live there and letting those other ones just pass right on by.

Who knows?