Tag Archives: mindfulness

FriendRaising: How to Meet Mindful Friends

by Sarah | Leave a comment

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Last month, we had a bit of a friend-raising theme going. Katie shared how she started a Facebook group geared toward getting kids outside. She also did a feature on the freakin’ awesome cookbook club she is a part of. I was fortunate enough to attend two of those events and I can only aspire to be a part of that community. I also gave you the 411 on starting your very own Meetup group. Today I’m back with a post that’s maaaybe a couple of weeks late if I wanted it to fit into that monthly theme, but WTF how is it April already?

As someone who has moved to a new city a few times since graduating from college, I know that making friends as an adult is super hard. Like really tough. There’s no longer access to a pool of people with similar interests like when we were on sports teams or going to school. I feel like adults usually meet friends at work or through a partner or the parents of your kids’ friends, but guess what? I had none of that! I’ve been self-employed since college, kidless, and long-distance dating. That being said, I’ve had to make friends on my own time and I’ve been so fortunate to meet awesome people, but it all came with some legwork.

I geared this post towards meeting friends of a certain type, because a while back one of my girlfriends asked me how she could meet more people like me. More people that were chill AF instead of anxious and stressed. More friends that had a mindfulness tilt. Know that you can take the advice below and alter it to whatever activity you are into. Each time you see the word mindful simply change it to the activity or trait you’re looking for whether it’s mountain biking, oil painting, or marathon running, this post should help you make more friends 🙂 Good luck!

 

Ways to Meet Mindful Friends:

  • Join a Meetup group that focuses on meditation
  • Go to a yoga class
  • Seek out events that mindful people would attend
  • Find a yoga or meditation festival near you
  • Look for online forums conversing meditation and mindfulness
  • Attend a mindfulness book reading or author signing

 

Join a Meetup group that focuses on meditation – There are dozens of groups in every major city that focus on meditation and mindfulness. Even if you are from a small town, with a quick google search, you can find a group that meets weekly or monthly. Join the group. Attend the meetings and begin to network. Once you feel comfortable in the group setting, you’ll start to make connections with other mindful people. If you sense a friendship blossoming, don’t be afraid to ask that person out on a friend date without the meditation group.

 

Go to a yoga class – Yoga and mindfulness go hand in hand. While a yoga class in itself is a solitary act, before and after class is a great time to connect. Arrive to class early and insert yourself into the group chatter. You never know, your new best bud may be in attendance. If you are not comfortable at one yoga studio, don’t let that deter you. There are many kinds of yoga and yoga studios, and there is indeed one that is right for you.

 

Seek out events that mindful people would attend – Mindfulness and meditation is probably not your only interest, and this is true for your future friend. Start perusing your town’s monthly calendar and highlight a few events that interest you. Look for activities focused on cultivating awareness whether it’s for the earth, the community itself, or a particular hobby. Community events draw a wonderful mix of people with similar interests and are a great first step in making new friends.

 

Find a yoga or meditation festival or retreat near you – Festivals are a great sphere to make friends. Many in attendance look forward to the event for months and are amped to smile and chat with new people. Sign up as an attendee or even a volunteer. While at the festival, try to seek out opportunities to interact in smaller groups as well. Maybe there is a workshop or class you can attend. These smaller groups give people the chance to connect on a deeper level. If you really want to make friends, attend a retreat. These small groups encourage attendees to really connect and many people stay in contact long after the retreat is over. I’m hosting a retreat in June in North Carolina if you are serious about this friend-finding mission!

 

Look for online forums conversing meditation and mindfulness – It seems we spend a lot of time connecting online these days. While we don’t want your mindfulness friendship to exist solely online, this is an excellent place to start. Google, Reddit, and Meetup act as good search engines and starter forums to find events and people to connect with who have a common interest.

 

Attend a mindfulness book reading or author signing – Keep your eye out for book readings and author signings near you. Pay specific attention to books that deal with mindfulness and meditation. Arrive early and don’t be afraid to strike up a conversation with other attendees. If you have a chance to chat with the author afterward or during the Q&A session, go ahead and ask where he or she has met mindfulness friends in the past. This could open a door for you with other attendees who are also looking for a mindful community.

 

You may feel alone sometimes, but we all do. Know that other mindful folks are looking for a friend too. Start your friend-finding journey by attending mindfulness events and inserting yourself into spaces where you know meditative people will be hanging out. 

 

Read With Me : How Emotions Are Made

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 This year, we’ve started a series called ‘Read With Me’ we’re sharing all most of what we’ve read this year in hopes you’ll follow suit and dust off that book you’ve been meaning to devour! Here are all the previous Read With Me posts.

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How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett took me several months to finish maybe closer to a year. This book is written for the layperson, but it is packed full of emerging neuroscience as well as past theories and research about emotion. In short, it’s a lot. Much of the information was new to me, which also meant I had to do a lot of highlighting (320 highlights to be exact!) and rereading as well as jumping back and forth when certain terms or studies were referenced again later. I read a few books at a time so I can chose depending on my mood and I had to bypass How Emotions Are Made before bed because I so badly wanted to read and understand each sentence. Continue reading …

Grateful For What Isn’t

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Being grateful for what isn’t is a simple mindfulness exercise I created to cultivate gratitude even in the shittiest situations. Sometimes it feels absolutely impossible to be grateful and that’s okay! I totally get it. That’s why, during those instances I choose to be grateful for what isn’t. Here is why it is important to be grateful for what isn’t:

  • How we focus our attention and how we intentionally direct the flow of energy and information through our neural circuits can directly alter the brain’s activity and its structure.
  • Even fleeting thoughts and feelings can leave lasting marks on your brain. Think of wax dripping down the side of a candle, each drip follows the path of the last one making the trails thicker and longer.
  • Each thought makes an impact, shift the flow of energy and emotion to create new pathways. If you’re continuing to feed into the negative you’re deepening those trails. If you’re shifting the thought process you’re working on building new pathways, new trails, new thought patterns.
  • We are building mindfulness by noticing the negative narration in our heads. We are giving ourselves the power to try to change the voiceover every single day.
  • Each time you decide to be Grateful For What Isn’t, you are shifting your brain’s ability to see situations as neutral or positive instead of negative.
  • Without going into too much neuroscience, neurons that fire together, wire together. Meaning by increasing the excitability of active neurons, you are strengthening existing synapses (connections) and building new ones while also weakening past neural networks that don’t serve you, i.e. constantly looking for negative outcomes. (Buy this book if you want to know more) – or shoot me an email and I’ll chat with you about the neuroscience I’m referencing for the basis of these exercises.

You probably get the hang of it, but here’s how to be grateful for what isn’t: You find yourself in a crappy situation.You can’t find anything to be grateful for so you decide to be grateful for what isn’t.

Example: Your flight is delayed by ten hours. Here are a list of grateful for what isn’t possibilities:

  • I am grateful I’m not traveling with kids.
  • I am grateful I don’t have health aliments to complicate things.
  • I am grateful I don’t have to catch another connecting flight at my next stop.
  • I am grateful my plane is delayed to be repaired instead of flying in disrepair.

If you’d like to take a listen, here’s a link to the meditation ‘Grateful for what isn’t. By adopting this mental exercise, we’ll begin to transform our mind. We’ll shift from seeing things as negative to neutral. We’ll flex those brain muscles intentionally until one day they take the initiative and start flexin’ for good on their own.

 

Ceasing My Smartphone Addiction

by Sarah | Leave a comment

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What would you do if you had more time? While I try not to glorify busy I do find I need more time in the day. I never seem to have enough of it. There are always more photos to be edited, more blog posts to be written, more belly rubs to give Cash, more yoga to be practiced, but where do I find an extra few minutes? I’ve cut out a lot of extraneous stuff already. I don’t own a T.V. and I watch maaaaybe five hours of Netflix each month. I deleted my Facebook app eight months ago. I almost never go shopping unless it’s for groceries and I work from home so there’s no commute to deal with.

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‘What the hell am I wasting time doing?’ I thought as I scrolled through Instagram. Oh. Instagram. I checked my battery usage under the settings tab and found that I spend over SEVEN hours a week on Instagram. WTF.  I spend another eight or so messaging friends and a measly one on Snapchat.

So what did I do? I deleted Snapchat for four days. Hahaha, I decided to quit my least used of my most used apps in an attempt to make myself feel better about my phone usage. Delusional? A little bit.

Once I came back from my epic Schu Tours trek in Nepal, I realized one thing. It was a big thing. Everything is too much. That’s right, it’s all too much. I long for simplicity. I want one goal for each day. I want fulfillment to come from focus, not from overachievement. I want nothing, but I want to do something, I just don’t want to do everything. Huh? I dunno. I’m still figuring it out, but I knew that carrying around a tiny computer and using it during 15% of my waking life each day was not what I wanted. It wasn’t adding value and so I wanted less. Less communication, connection, and consumption of virtual reality. I had just experienced weeks of authentic, unplugged connection and I wanted more of that and less of everything else.

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I don’t plan on going back to a flip phone. Although it’s kind of ironic that this post is coming exactly two years after ditching mine – read more about that here. It’s even funnier that last year around this time I posted about being addicted to my iPhone. I guess it’s taken another year for me to realize this lifestyle of constant checking and updating is not one that I want for myself. That yes, my phone helps my business and that yes, I use that as an excuse to scroll through Instagram for what amounts to roughly SEVENTEEN DAYS in a year. Holy Sh!t.

Below are some tools I’ve employed to use my phone a lot less.

Continue reading …

Meditative Mondays – Episode 1

by Sarah | Leave a comment

Hey babes! *Years* ago I thought about creating a weekly email newsletter to cultivate a more regular meditation practice and that was before I knew anything about meditation. The only thing I was certain of was that it made me feel good. Since then, I’ve read countless mindfulness texts, completed my 200-hour yoga teacher training and stuck to a consistent meditation practice each week so today I’ve finally gon’ and dun it. I sent out the first Meditative Mondays newsletter.

You can sign up for the email here & learn more about what they contain here or you can say screw all that and simply listen along below for a quick Meditative Monday session.

 

If you want to be super helpful you can tell me how to get rid of that underlying fuzzzzzz sound in my audio. I think it’s picking up noise from my DSLR. Do I need a deadcat wind muff? Should I not use this Rode mic? Should I use a lav mic instead? Is that crazy? I don’t want you to be able to hear me swallow like on Ted Talks. I find that creepy. And you thought you read this blog because I had the answers, nope! I know practically nothing and that’s after graduating with a degree in Journalism where I actively gathered news via audio and video for four years. Help.

Water Meditation

by Sarah | Leave a comment

Interested in mindfulness and meditation? Check this out.

Sup pups? I wanted to kick off the week with a Monday morning meditation. A few weeks ago we focused on the trees and this week I’m thinking water.  Remember, our goal is simple mindfulness or awareness. We’re noticing the sensations in our mind, heart and body in the present moment. Watching without judgment. If you can watch yourself and your actions you can control them or at least begin to understand them more fully.

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Similar to the tree meditation, we simply want to notice water. Recognize the significance of water in your life. If you think you’re already there, try giving thanks or offering gratitude each time you receive the positive benefits of water. It’s practically impossible, yeah? It would consume your whole day. Afterall we are more water than blood.

After you finish reading this post, be mindful of your interactions with water today. Think about how you’ve already made use of water. Did you brush your teeth? Make coffee? Wash your face? How will you use water during the next few hours? Maybe you’ll flush a toilet, wash your hands, or do a load of laundry. Beyond using water today, what are you wearing, eating and using that has already consumed water? It takes 1,800 gallons of water just to grow enough cotton for a pair of blue jeans and that doesn’t take into account the rest of the process. A single pound of meat takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce. Water is our lifeblood and yet we take it for granted.

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We tend to only pay attention to water if there’s a problem or scarcity. Water is seen as expendable and probably will be until shortages impact each of us directly. We water lawns, wash cars and maintain golf courses in the desert. We are running the earth dry and it’s starting to become apparent, just read about the disappearance of the Aral Sea pictured above.

Embrace the precious nature of water and treat it accordingly. Katie and I have a sister between us, Kristin, and her and her husband Ryan had a very touching elopement ceremony in which they incorporated a glass jar of water. A few of us were gathered in the snowy Pennsylvania woods one February while Kristin and Ryan held up the glass jug and explained the importance of water in their relationship. Water to them is symbolic of life. When they share their water with each other or their friends, they are quite literally offering them life. Kristin and Ryan never take their offering of water for granted and in turn are touched each time they share sips. Then they each took a sip of water before passing the jar around to each of us in attendance. After hearing Kris and Ryan explain it this way, I’ve never looked at water any differently. Each time someone offers me a sip of water, I find it to be a deeply meaningful gesture. An offering of life.

We all know that water is significant, but do we recognize it fully? Are we grateful? Do we do anything to ensure clean water for our future besides paying the water bill? Try your hardest today to begin to simply appreciate the role of water in your life. No matter the beverage, with each sip, stay present with how the water in it nourishes your body. When you wash your hands, really feel the water on your skin instead of rushing to dry it off. When you move throughout the world today notice the water around you whether it’s a miniscule amount in a plastic bottle or the coastline of the Pacific, but most of all notice that it’s there. Consider yourself lucky. Over 700 million people world-wide do not have access to clean water. Notice the abundance of water in your life and recognize that you are privileged.

 

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Two Bits

by Sarah | Leave a comment

We want to break down these internet barriers and invite you into our lives and we’re hoping you’ll do the same.  You are welcome to share a bit of your week or day in the comments, or if they’re better represented by a photo, tag us on instagram @liveseasoned.

Sarah Here :

Friyayyy! What the f*ck happened to my week?! I’ll share my Monday alone.. Sunday evening I had an awesome friend date in Philadelphia, I stayed up all night and then drove to the airport around 3:30 a.m. I boarded my flight an hour later, slightly peeved about my middle seat and life in general since it’s 5 a.m. and I haven’t slept yet. I passed out, waking up only when the woman next to me spilled her diet coke all over my leg, and then again when the plane landed. I switched my phone off airplane mode and immediately saw two dozen messages from my photography partner basically telling me *not* to fly to Houston and if I did to turn around and come home. WTF… FML… all the curses.

I got off the plane, headed down to grab my bag, called a couple of airlines and secured a flight home in a few hours. Now what? I had a few options, be grumpy as fuck or get over it. Aren’t these pretty much always the options when life doesn’t go as planned? We can get emotional and upset or we can choose to get over it. We can replay all the ways it was supposed to go or we can be at peace with what is.

I recognized how shitty my day could become if I played into the pity party that was forming at my mind’s door. In that moment I decided to experiment with a mindfulness exercise in awareness. I like to call it Flip The Script, because I’m not that creative and it really is as simple as that. Each time I noticed an inner complaint, grumpy reaction or just pissiness in general, I completely flipped the script. It helped me to be aware of the negative inner talk and then poke fun at it. It went something like this:

  • Identify the negative thought or complaint
  • Turn it into a positive
  • Take a breath and move on
  • Repeat x Repeat x Repeat

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Here are a couple of examples, the initial negative thoughts are in red – while the flipped script is green.

Thoughts as I walked into the food court : Great. Shitty airport food and it’s all lunch or dinner options except Starbucks. Yes! A free pass to eat pizza before 9 a.m.

Thoughts as a huge drop of sauce falls onto my only sweatshirt : Fuck. How will I stay warm and not look like a slob? I knew laying so far back in this chair and eating was a bad idea and yet I did it anyway. Hahaha I’m basically laying down and eating, what did I expect putting forth so little effort to eat a saucy pizza?

Thoughts as I walk through the Philadelphia airport : Wow. It’s 5 p.m. it’s been twelve hours since I’ve been here. I hate this place. I wish I was in RDU (my home airport of Raleigh Durham) I’m so much closer to my car and therefore freedom than I have been all day. You hate Philadelphia? Good thing you don’t live here anymore.

Thoughts as I turn on my car and see my gas light is on : Of course you’d do this to yourself. This is not the first or last time the gas light will come on. This is how you operate. You can get a kombucha when you stop for gas.

Thoughts as I pay $24 for parking at the airport : Cool. I just paid $24 to park here while I spent twelve hours in airports. Today was cool. I would have paid nearly $300 if I left Houston on schedule. At least the parking attendant was super nice. (He gave me Tootsie rolls!)

Thoughts as I sit in traffic on the way out of Philly : 5:30 p.m. could not have picked a better time to drive to D.C. than rush hour on a Monday. I didn’t choose this time to leave. I’ll make it to D.C. in time for sunset. I’ll eat dinner with a friend and meet her two new kittens.

After the traffic cleared and I made my way to D.C. I can’t recall anymore negative thoughts. Sure, they came back after I left D.C. and drove through the night home to North Carolina, but I went ahead and flipped the script every time. Why?

Each year, I read Buddha’s Brain, a book I’ve recommended dozens of times on this blog. I had just read a passage the night before that said, “even fleeting thoughts and feelings can leave lasting marks on your brain, much like a spring shower can leave little trails on a hillside.” When I landed in Houston and got the call to immediately come back east, my rational brain thought, ‘okay this is fine, I’m not going to die, I’m not going to make a bunch of money that I need either, but all in all I am okay and this is just one day in my life.’ Those initial thoughts were helpful in then recognizing that an hour later I had started to flip the script in a negative way and started feeding into the grumpiness after I had already told myself that everything was fine. Why was that? Probably because that’s the thought pattern my brain is used to. Something happened that wasn’t planned that I don’t like, I should be super grumpy about it. Not so.

Buddha’s Brain helped me to understand that how we focus our attention and how we intentionally direct the flow of energy and information through our neural circuits can directly alter the brain’s activity and its structure. Knowing how to harness awareness to promote well-being and positive change is the key to working with that scientific knowledge. If you’re aware of negative thought patterns, you have the power to try to change them every single day. 

Actively watching my negative thoughts and flipping the script might seem like a minute action, but these small exercises actually build up to larger changes as new neural structures are built. Neurons that fire together, wire together that’s why it’s imperative to be on your own side instead of adding to the misery. Whenever I’m being a grumpy see you next Tuesday, I seriously ask myself, ‘do I want the bitch muscles to flex or weaken?’ Each of us has a good and a bad side, try actively feeding the one you want to prosper and see what happens. Even if you can’t catch yourself with each negative thought, after you’ve had a rough day or something didn’t go as planned, try to seek out the positive or the benefits and say them to yourself. The best part about my Monday? I realized I LOVE my blue saucy sweatshirt turned inside out better than right side out, so yeah, I basically was granted a new favorite sweatshirt for that whole debacle. Worth it? Sure.

Happy Friday y’all!

 

Quiet The Mind – Why You Should Meditate

by Sarah | 3 Comments

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“Quiet the mind,” this is how I start most of my meditation practices. Take a moment to settle, to arrive, to quiet the mind. What does this mean? It’s such a tough task, for you and for your mediation teacher alike. It gets easier of course, but some days hurtle a thousand thoughts in your direction and you get caught up in trying to hold onto them, to dissect them, to attach to them, to figure out what exactly they mean.

The initial goal of meditation is to separate yourself from your thoughts. You are not your thoughts. Your brain is a muscle that is constantly flexing, it’s comfortable in a tornado of thoughts whether they’re useful or not, your goal as a meditation practitioner is to sit in a calm state with all these thoughts swirling around you. To stay centered while tiny tidbits and major revelations are trying to pull you off your seat. Eventually the thoughts will start to fall away. They’ll live in the periphery and you’ll sit comfortably knowing you can engage if you see the thought as valid or useful, but also knowing you can allow the madness to swirl around you while you relax. These are the benefits of a consistent mediation practice. Internal calm even when the world around you is going up in flames.

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Sarah’s Favorite Mindfulness Books

by Sarah | 2 Comments

This post was first published in March 2016, but we’re back today with three new suggestions.

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Namaste 🙂 Want to practice being mindful? I have a little list of books to get you started, or further you on your way, if you’re already a meditatin’ fool. Each time I post something on instagram that is introspective, I feel like I’m preaching a little bit.  That makes me a little self conscious or unsure because I never know how you’ll react, but time and time again it’s been well received, therefore I can only assume you’d like to know more about being mindful since that’s where all these post stem from.

What does it mean to be mindful? To me, it means living life with intention and opening your awareness in the present moment without passing judgement.  It’s kind of like being a screen door on a breezy day. There’s a lot going on outside the house as well as inside, but you’re simply an observer of both. You’re enjoying the breeze, feeling the sunshine or raindrops, but you’re not reacting to either, just enjoying the flow of life.

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