All posts tagged: Mindfulness

ATTITUDE TO GRATITUDE

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“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” — Albert Einstein   These days it is pretty hard to avoid the topic of gratitude. You know that it is one of those things you should focus on, but when you’re in the midst of a melt-down, work hustle or just the daily grind it can be easily overlooked. But did you know that gratitude affects your success? Yup, it’s a bit more interesting now isn’t it! Here are a few major ways gratitude and success are connected. Gratitude Shifts Your Focus Like attracts like. This may all seem a little airy to some of you, but stay with me, it is worth it – I promise. Have you ever noticed that the more you focus on the negatives around you like like obstacles or setbacks that you have, the more problems seem to surface and consume your time? You may have slept through your alarm becoming late …

LIVE A SIMPLER LIFE

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Need a bit of a pep talk? Life is getting a little out of control? We have all been there, having your ah-ha moment is the first step to getting back on track. Getting back to basics, culling those habits that need vanquishing and cultivating those that need a little kick start is your next step. Simplification my friends. It sounds simple, but watch out, simplicity can be quite the trickster! One of the first items on my list when I am determined to declutter my life and mind is to take on the digital world – yep, online cleanse! For although all things digital can seem like they are making our lives easier (helllooooo online shopping!) it can quite quickly become overwhelming and clutter our heads and home environment. So let the cleanse begin… HAVE LESS. I have a particular love of the Minimalists, Maria Kondo and her Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. If you are like me and have an unfortunate habit of collecting large amounts of dust trapping, knickknacks, magazines and …

CHANGE: A CURATED (SIMPLE) LIFE

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curate2 kjʊ(ə)ˈreɪt/ verb past tense: curated; past participle: curate To select, organize, and look after the items in (a collection or exhibition). When I realised that I had to get real and get myself and my life together it sparked a whole lot of thinking. As far as I could see, the problem was that I was all over the place in every aspect of my life. The problem was that nothing was broken so I didn’t look at anything too closely. Bank account? Noooooo, I didn’t want to check that – I knew that my latest trip to Karen Walker made me want to avoid that baby for a while. Sort out what I had on that week? I was pretty sure I had double booked myself multiple days, so I was going to ignore that until it was almost on top of me. You get the picture, and that was just scratching the surface! An idea that kept niggling at the corner of my mind was why I had so much cr@p in …

MINDFULNESS: MENTAL BANDWIDTH

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One of my pet hates is (insert wail) “There are just not enough hours in a day and it stresses me out!!!”. Before you get mad and tell me just how busy you are being busy, just give me a minute to explain. If you never give your life a mental stock take then it will easily run out of control. This is what I will keep going on about here on Conscious Me. You have to stay on top of your life! Yes it is admin-y work. No, it isn’t as fun as hitting the sofa with a Friends re-run. It is your life though. How important is it to you really? I get it, with work life often bleeding into our personal lives we are faced with a barrage of emails, meetings, phone calls, voice messages, family, friends, life admin – the list goes on. We are all just so busyyyyyy! You tell yourself that you have to take it all on. Sheer frustration may drive you to keep adding more to your …

LIFE: ARE YOU SUFFERING FROM BROWNOUT?

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IT’S THE MINI MELTDOWN BEFORE THE GREAT BIG MELTDOWN! So, you know there is a problem but you can’t quite put your finger on it. You know that you are not ‘burnt-out’. That is pretty bad and usually fairly spectacular. You come to work, you do pretty good too – but not great. You generally feel tired and lethargic. Overwhelmingly, you feel unhappy… Does this sound familiar? You are not alone in this. In fact, this reaction to work has started to become so common that it has been given a name – BROWNOUT.  Brownout, is a term which is used to describe part of the life stage of an electrical power outage and is the stage before a black out. Put into simple terms, if you consider burnout like the flu, then brownout is like the common cold – they both have similar symptoms but brownout is the less vicious. You still go to work, but your heart just isn’t in it. You still talk to friends and family but you start to retreat …

MINDFULNESS: Enjoy some calm

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Sat in bold black writing on my goal list is to learn how to meditate. It’s always sounded like something I should do, but I don’t know how to. Those that meditate seem to belong to a very select and zen group that are absolutely in the “know”. It is always in the health mag’s and in my favourite blogs that proclaim (and rather loudly!) that it’s really freakin’ brilliant. They say you can’t know the peace/awareness/contentment until you do it. My brain drives me mental. I have a very busy mind and one that is quite happy to have races with itself, just around 3am! “We are what we think, having become what we thought,” – Dhammapada, ancient Buddhist text   State of mind. Pretty big subject that. Especially considering that the mind is both the problem and the solution (love that saying). It is not fixed, it is fluid. The idea that we can change how and what we think is something that fascinates me but then the thought of setting by myself with the silence …