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THEY SHAPE US. THEY DO NOT DEFINE US.
DIRECTORY
FEELINGS AND EMOTIONSMindfulness Self Care for Emotional GrowthRELATED LISTSFEATURED LISTS
PONDERING THE PHOBIA ~ The Words of Fear
Complete dictionary of Phobias to peruse and a Library of self care articles on panic and anxiety extracted from my books.
Fear Dictionary ~~ Fear Library ​

Story of Soulmates - View | File ​​​​​
Greek Origins of Erotic Vocabulary ~ View | File
The Defining Story of the Kiss ~ View | File

ASSOCIATED BOOKS

RIDING THE CRAZY TRAIN

Guide to Understanding Your Emotions
​Your feelings and emotions matter. They mean something to you. They affect your life. They are a part of you. It’s normal. The secret is to own them and not let them own you. They do not define us.
PREVIEW ONLINE | DOWNLOAD

SECRETS OF THE HEART

Defining and Understanding the Meaning of Attraction, Lust, Affection, Love, Sex.
​Love. We think about it, sing about it, dream about it, worry about it. When we don’t have it, we search for it; when we find it, we don’t know what to do with it; and when we have it, we fear losing it. How to define it? Can we ever understand it?
PREVIEW ONLINE | DOWNLOAD

BE MINDFUL BE WELL

Series of mindfulness centered self care
​Learn the principles of compassionate self care and how to integrate mindfulness principles in the care and growth of your emotional health.
LEARN MORE AND DOWNLOAD
IN THIS SECTION
A Mind of Mindful Emotions
Defining the Elements of Mindfulness
An Exercise in Mindfulness

Download Be Mindful Be Well: A Series of Mindfulness Self Care Guides:
Learn mindfulness centered self care strategies to live mindfully and to be well. Three part series with associated glossaries.

RELATED PAGES FROM THE FEAR LIBRARY
​Extracts from Be Mindful Be Well
​SELF CARE: Defining What It Really Means ​MINDFUL COPING STRATEGIES

ELEMENTS OF MINDFULNESS


​How Mindfulness Helps You
  • Become fully engaged in life
  • Create a greater capacity to deal with adverse events, negative emotions and traumatic memories
  • Reduce worries about the future or regrets over the past
  • Eliminate concerns about what other people think of you, your success, your money, or your looks.
  • Improve your physical health by helping to relieve stress, treat heart disease, lower blood pressure, reduce chronic pain, improve sleep, and alleviate gastrointestinal difficulties.
  • Improve your mental health by helping with depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, conflicts, anxiety disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

MINDFULNESS doesn’t need you to change. Solutions that ask us to change who we are or become something we’re not have failed us over and over again. Mindfulness recognizes and cultivates the best of who we are as human beings.

MINDFULNESS is thought to help with focus because it thickens your prefrontal cortex, a part of your brain that's involved in focus, planning, and impulse control. It also raises your brain's level of dopamine, which can be in short supply.

MINDFULNESS eases stress. People who regularly do mindfulness meditation have been found to have lower levels of stress hormones when they're in settings or situations that cause anxiety, like when you feel helpless and out of control. Research also shows that mindfulness meditation can lead to shedding pounds, probably because it encourages you to think more carefully about everything you're doing, including what you eat.

MINDFULNESS helps you focus on what matters. The key is to use mindfulness throughout your daily life by always being aware of where your attention is focused while you are engaged in routine activities. Once you get used to checking in with yourself and your body, you can apply the technique anytime you start to feel overwhelmed.

MINDFULNESS is easy. Unlike other treatments, mindfulness meditation doesn't need a prescription or a trip to a therapist's office. You can practice it sitting or walking, or even through some types of yoga.

MINDFULNESS practice has been employed to reduce symptoms of depression, stress, worry, and anxiety.

MINDFULNESS helps anxiety. Research studies have consistently shown a positive relationship between mindfulness and ensuring good psychological health. Anxiety can be reduced and the pain from depression can ease in time.

MINDFULNESS may be a preventive strategy to halt the development of mental-health problems.

MINDFULNESS quiets your mind. All you’re trying to do is pay attention to the present moment, without judgment.

  • You go with the flow. Once you establish concentration, you observe the flow of thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations without judging them as good or bad and accepting them for what they are.
  • You become aware of sensations. You notice external sensations such as sounds, sights, and touch more clearly.
  • The challenge is not to latch onto a particular idea, emotion, or sensation. Do not get caught in thinking about the past or the future.
  • Watch what comes and goes in your mind Discover which mental habits produce a feeling of well-being or one of suffering.
  • Practice Acceptance: Practicing means accepting whatever arises in your awareness at each moment. Acceptance of your thoughts, feelings, sensations is vital. It involves being kind and forgiving of yourself. Acceptance means you are compassionately accepting without judgement.
  • Practice Calming the Mind: Your mind will wander. As you practice paying attention to what’s going on in your body and mind at the present moment, you’ll find that many thoughts arise. At the beginning it may seem hard to manage your racing thoughts and focus on your breathing. This is normal. When you have an outside thought you need to acknowledge it, accept it, and don’t judge yourself for it. Then calmly bring yourself back to the present.
  • Process Self-Judgement: Your judgy brain will try to take over. We are all guilty of listening to the critic in our heads a little more than we should. When we practice investigating our judgments and diffusing them, we can learn to choose how we look at things and react to them. When you practice mindfulness, try not to judge yourself for whatever thoughts pop up. Notice them, make a mental note of them, and let them pass.
  • Learn to Let Go: It’s all about returning your attention again and again to the present moment. It seems like our minds are wired to get carried away in thought. That’s why mindfulness is the practice of returning, again and again, to the breath. We use the sensation of breath as an anchor to the present moment. And every time we return to the breath, we reinforce our ability to do it again.

Mindfulness Components

The first component involves the self-regulation of attention so that it is maintained on immediate experience, thereby allowing for increased recognition of mental events in the present moment.

The second component involves adopting a particular orientation towards one’s experiences in the present moment, an orientation that is characterized by curiosity, openness, and acceptance

The Five Aggregate Model enables one to understand the moment to moment manifestation of subjective conscious experience.

  • Material form: includes both the physical body and external matter where material elements are continuously moving to and from the material body.
  • Feelings: can be pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.
  • Perceptions: represent being aware of attributes of an object (e.g. color, shape, etc.)
  • Volition: represents bodily, verbal, or psychological behavior.
  • Sensory consciousness: refers to input from the five senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting or touch sensations) or a thought that happens to arise in the mind.

Mindfulness Tips
  • Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
  • Surrender to what is. Let go of what was. Have faith in what will be.
  • The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it
  • Be happy in the moment, that’s enough. Each moment is all we need, not more.
  • The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness.
  • Wherever you are, be there totally.

No amount of anxiety can change the future
No amount of regret can change the past

Feeling anxiety? Do a grounding tool. Look around you. Find 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste. This is called grounding. It’s helpful to do whenever you feel anxious.

Stressed? Try not to get stressed about the family who doesn’t treat you right. Feel blessed about the family who’s always there for you. Life is too short to stress about people who don’t deserve room in your heart.

Panicked? Close your eyes and imagine ocean waves. Quiet your mind by envisioning the waves

  • Stop Chatter. Practicing mindfulness clears away the mental chatter and makes way for creativity to emerge. When you learn to liberate your mind from distractions and become an impartial observer of everything around you, you improve your ability to gain insights and new perspectives.
  • Awareness/Observation (sampajana): Understanding what the mind is doing-whether it releases what is arising, or getting involved with it. Recognizing the movements of mind’s attention, or is it moving into craving and clinging.
  • Open monitoring: Building on attentional stability and clarity achieved with focused attention meditation, the aim here is to maintain an open, curious non-discriminating awareness of all arising sensations and mental events. During open monitoring, thoughts, feelings and sensations occur and are observed, but the practitioner does not react to or engage with them.
  • Ordering the breath is achieved by conscious breathing, continuously observing and controlling one's breathing movements and with complete control on one's thoughts. As you exhale and inhale consciously, you should train yourself to be conscious of the whole body, the components of the mind, realize the impermanence of all things, or to dwell on passionlessness and renunciation.
  • Choice: our choices about what we do with our minds. These choices will create karma. Karma is action. That moment of choice conditions the next moment. Every moment brings a little moment of peace and a little moment of peace starts changing how your life is and how your mind is.
  • Self-regulated attention: involves bringing awareness to current experience - observing and attending to the changing fields of "objects" (thoughts, feelings, sensations), from moment to moment – by regulating the focus of attention.

MINDFUL SELF FORGIVENESS
Self-forgiveness is an element of self-compassion that involves releasing self-directed negative feelings. Research has found that self-forgiveness promotes greater overall well-being, specifically higher self-esteem and lower neuroticism.

MINDFUL SELF ACCEPTANCE
Self-acceptance is an element of self-compassion that involves accepting yourself for who and what you are. Self-acceptance differs from self-esteem in that self-esteem involves globally evaluating one's worth. Self-acceptance means accepting yourself despite flaws, weaknesses, and negative evaluations from others.

MINDFUL SELF-COMPASSION
Being self-compassionate is about being present for yourself and holding space for the “humanness” of your experience. You do your best to understand it, without trying to fix it or without judging it as wrong or bad. Instead of just ignoring your pain or approaching it with a “stiff upper lip” mentality, you stop to tell yourself “this is really difficult right now… How can I comfort and care for myself in this moment?”

Instead of judging and criticizing yourself for various inadequacies, self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted with personal failings – after all, whoever said you were supposed to be perfect? You may try to change in ways that allow you to be healthier and happier, but this is done because you care about yourself, not because you are worthless or unacceptable as you are.

Having compassion for yourself means that you honor and accept your humanness. Things will not always go the way you want them to. You will encounter frustrations, losses will occur, you will make mistakes, bump up against your limitations, fall short of your ideals. This is the human condition, a reality shared by all of us. The more you open your heart to this reality instead of fighting against it, the more you will be able to feel compassion for yourself and all your fellow humans in the experience of life.

You’ll know compassion by the way it feels. Compassion comes with a sense that you are looking at yourself (or another) with a soft gaze and a gentleness in your heart, while still being objective and without being naive or enabling. Compassion is different from empathy because you are staying outside of the situation, rather than emotionally merging with it. Once you have connected with the feeling of compassion, imagine showing up for yourself exactly as you would for this other person. Turn those questions around onto yourself and your situation:
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THEY SHAPE US. THEY DO NOT DEFINE US.
EMOTIONS AND FEELINGS​ - HomeMindfulness Self Care for Emotional GrowthRELATED SECTIONS​
​FEATURED LISTS
PONDERING THE PHOBIA ~ The Words of Fear
Complete dictionary of Phobias to peruse and a Library of self care articles on panic and anxiety extracted from my books.
Fear Dictionary ~~ Fear Library ​

Story of Soulmates - View | File ​​​​​
Greek Origins of Erotic Vocabulary ~ View | File
The Defining Story of the Kiss ~ View | File

DOWNLOAD MINDFULNESS GUIDES
Guide to Understanding Your Emotions

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