Mindfulness

I just finished reading The Art of Mindful Reading by Ella Berthoud.  The Art of Mindful Reading was a short, clear and encouraging book.  It provided mindfulness practices during every state of the book, including ones to help the reader discover what kind of reader that they are.  Berthoud creates exercises that encourage and accept that every book reader is different. The book is the perfect length to create a mindfulness practice, it goes into the right amount of detail to allow the reader to sit down and go through the whole book, or break it up over time, building a mindfulness practice of reading from nothing.  This book (and possibly the whole series)  goes on my list of great mindfulness tools because it also gives some of the research behind why reading, mindfulness and especially mindful reading benefits the reader. 

I discovered mindfulness when I was 16  years old.  Actually, what I discovered was that there was a place in Illinois that specialized in treating Self-harm through DBT.  After I found what seemed like a miracle to my young and lost mind, I began a mindfulness practice of my own.  

When I was sixteen years old, I knew more "cutters" than I knew years of life.  Some cutters were trying to quit, while others were proud of their scars and knowing that talking about it made people uncomfortable.  I was in debate and began giving a speech about how to help people that self harmed (complete with a list of numbers to call) for the individual speech event oratory.  My call to action was to help save lives through simple behaviors.  It wasn't for another year until the adults took my resources and built a response plan for self harm in the school.  

As I'm sure you can imagine, this process made 16 year old me a bit anxious. I began using the mindfulness that I learned while researching DBT to help myself calm down.  I would focus on my breathing or if I was doing an activity I would focus on that. Most Americans seem to struggle with mindfulness practice because they think they are supposed to do nothing while being mindful and their time is precious commodity that can only be used to be productive in some way.  Mindfulness can be a way to focus your energy into one activity at a time, becoming more successful and healthy.

I highly encourage mindfulness practice for anyone trying to be healthier.