It’s a wild world out there.  Our attention is pulled towards many topics — both positive and negative. It’s common to feel jerked around by the boundless news stories, work deadlines, entertainment products, and advertisements competing for your eyes and ears.   Among this hurricane of information, there’s an important question to ask yourself:

How do you manage your mind?

In this time of limitless connectivity, it’s important to take an honest look inward and evaluate how we manage the focus of our mind.  

Your mind only has a limited amount of attention that it can give.  When you give your attention to one thing, you are simultaneously taking attention and energy away from all the other things that attract your focus.  

If you sense that you could use a bit of reconfiguring — we’d like to nominate mindfulness to be part of your practice of self-care and self-development.

Awaken Your Mindful Self

Mindfulness is a state of active, open attention on the present. When you’re mindful, you carefully observe your thoughts and feelings without judging them good or bad.

Mindfulness can be cultivated in meditation, yoga (or any form of intentional exercise), reading, forest bathing, cooking, tidying, and quality conversation.  For more guidance and inspiration to develop your mindfulness practice, check out this six simple exercises from VeryWell Mind.

Let’s Be Honest

Mindfulness can be one of your best friends on your personal path of well-being. Because mindfulness helps us see what things are rather than what they feel like in the moment, developing a discipline of mindfulness is like deciding to spend more time with that friend that always tells the truth and keeps you honest.  The clarity of truth lightens your load.  It enlightens your mind and spirit, giving your more mental space for the things that make you happy and fulfilled.

Because of this, mindfulness is one of the strongest mental tools you can develop.  Even a novice degree of mindfulness cultivation can help you navigate the world and its many distractions with confidence.  It’s pretty remarkable how this small, unassuming mental habit can feel like your very own superpower.

How We Can Help

The Skylonda Program – and retreat from your normal, day-to-day habits in general – can help you detach from distracting habits and instead hold space to develop mindfulness. The key is to surround yourself with individuals who, like you, are looking to engage in self-development practices.  At Skylonda, our staff will guide you through a number of experiences that will naturally evoke and nurture your mindful self.  Read what our past guests are saying about their time at Skylonda.

There are many dimensions of one’s life where we can cultivate mindfulness: meditation, nonjudgement, self-discovery, forgiveness, urge-control, and self-love are few. Until you are ready to visit us in person, we’d like to challenge with this question:

What is one place in your life where you can cultivate mindfulness?