Changes Big and Small

SO… new job, renewed effort to participate more actively in therapy… new app to help track my care/self-care tasks and keep me motivated. Going back to physical therapy to address the semi-recent upswing in my mid-back pain. All good things.

Physical therapist said I did really well today. I have an exercise to do daily at home, and he said if I really wanted, if there were any I liked that we did there (that didn’t require the machines we used), that I could try adding those at home, too.

Today, my therapist-therapist and I agreed that I could pepper in the “How” skills of Mindfulness, as I had already been working on the “What” skills for some time. Still going to try keeping up with the “What’s.”

The What’s are Observe, Describe, Participate.

If you can’t experience it with your own senses, you can’t describe it. It’s not part of your observations. Take in what’s going on around you; if you have thoughts or feelings that arise from your experience of your surroundings, label them as a thought, a feeling, and let the thoughts and feelings pass without clinging to them or rejecting them as “wrong.”

As part of all of that, I was working on mindful eating, breathing exercises where I tried to describe to myself the sensation of my breath, singing along to the radio in the car to participate or really throwing myself into activities at work, etc. There was a lot more to it than that, which I did here and there over the past two weeks, but that gives you an idea.

I have found mindful eating makes food more satisfying. Eating more slowly, savoring each bite, sometimes eating with my eyes closed to really focus on texture and flavor, trying to catch the scent of my food before I eat it.

It makes the food taste better, too. One of my favorite recent treats is picking up small bags of mini meltaway chocolate bars from a local chocolatier and taking small bites, letting each bite melt completely on my tongue. A teeny bar goes a lot longer that way, and the flavor seems so much richer.

Music has also been a big help. Listening to certain songs with my eyes closed and focusing on all the layers to the sound. Feeling the feels.

I even made a playlist called Songs to Help Me Cry for when I really feel like I need the release but am struggling to access my emotions. Put that together yesterday.

What’s really funny is that I found a lot of great tearjerker material in someone’s handcrafted playlist of music from the first two Deadpool movies, which I had just watched, after finishing allll the Wolverine stuff.

Right now, I’m listening to the Japanese Zen Garden Soundscape playlist on Spotify. Very soothing.

My therapist even said taking a break from self-improvement to binge Marvel movies was also self-care. Which I thought was awesome. I enjoyed the experience immensely.

BUT we were moving on to talking about How skills.

So these are kind of how you should go about implementing the What skills. They act in concert with one another.

Non-judgmentally, One-mindfully, Effectively.

So that’s what I’m going to try to work on.

Trying to capture the essence of cherishing life as often and as fully as I can, knowing full well there will be moments when I will struggle to do so.

I also added a lot of Mindfulness activities to my Finch goals for every day. Some of them are maybe a little redundant, but I don’t think it hurts to catch more than one mediation a day, or do a breathing exercise in addition to, or to let your thoughts pass like clouds, and observe your thoughts without judgment.

Beyond all that, I added a 10 minute nature walk to my daily Finch app goals. That didn’t sound like a lot, and it was pretty nice out. So today, I set a timer for 10 minutes and walked back home around the time it went off (a little after). So it was more like 20 minutes.

Still have to see about dinner, but I thought I’d check in. I also found this lovely slide in Canva all about Mindfulness practice ideas, for anyone interested. Have an awesome rest of your day!!!