Use mindfulness to help you tackle challenges

Liz Lowe is your guide to how you can use mindfulness to help you recognise the transience of uncomfortable sensations.

By paying attention to how fear shows up physically in the body we can get better at riding out uncomfortable sensations and recognising their transience.

Perhaps you’ve set yourself a new challenge that feels a bit scary?

Notice precisely where and how you feel that fear and if you’re holding tension anywhere.

Breathwork

Take some long, slow breaths as you acknowledge and welcome the feelings in, releasing tension with your exhales.

Calm breathing will signal to your brain that you’re safe, which will help your body to relax. Once you identify how you react to fear, you can begin calm breathing as soon as you feel those familiar sensations building.

Internal chatter

If your mind is buzzing with unhelpful chatter, mindfulness can help there too. Maybe you’re doubting your ability, questioning why you set this challenge or putting obstacles in the way to prevent you from tackling it?

Recognise that thoughts are not facts – thinking of them as passing mental events or internal weather can help.

We can practise acknowledging but then unhooking ourselves from our thoughts and letting them pass by, rather than allowing them to spiral off into stories. Like physical sensations, they are transient and will pass.

If you’d like to explore mindfulness further, plumvillage.org has some great (free) resources.

This article is from the February issue of Outdoor Swimmer. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.