MANY QUESTIONS CAN BE ANSWERED INTERNALLY WHILST DOING MINDFULNESS EXERCISES
Despite being constantly affected by anxiety, I find it very difficult to name what most emotions are, even when they’re my own. I’m frequently queried by my therapists and support people as to what exactly caused me to feel discomfort. During those moments I cannot find any answer or reason, to begin with at least.
Emotional reactions and sensations involve so many complexities, and this confuses me a lot. I’m pleased that I can’t read facial expressions because life is complicated enough for me without analysing them. When it comes to my own emotions, I do feel sensations of anxiety as well as pleasure. Yet questions involving how I am feeling at given moments, and especially why I am feeling a particular way, are extremely difficult for me to understand and pinpoint.
However, back in 2015 I was given a useful suggestion by a therapist, which was to use different kinds of mindfulness exercises. At the time I didn’t have a thorough understanding of what mindfulness exercises were, nor of what they can do to benefit one’s psychological and cognitive mindset.
In addition to grounding our emotions and stabilising our dopamine levels, mindfulness exercises also help us to fully tune in to our inner world.
Each person is an individual, so different exercises affect us all in different ways. In other words an exercise which positively works for one person may not do so for another, and vice versa. Therefore my therapist said that she would give me a “taste platter” of various kinds of mindfulness exercises to experiment with. After finding the ones from that “platter” which worked best, I did some further study of my own and found a few more exercises that I’m continuing to use to this day.
In previous blogs I’ve mentioned that I find that mindfulness colouring, creating Minecraft worlds, doing a grounding exercise (called Leaves on a Stream), and listening to classical music very effective. Thus I use them whenever I’m feeling sensory overload, confusing emotions that I cannot initially comprehend, or sensations of intense panic and anxiety.
Prior to now, I have spoken a lot about mindfulness exercises successfully grounding my mind and emotions. However this is the first blog in which I mention that these exercises also help me to see and understand what exactly is affecting me at any given time.
From my selection of effective mindfulness exercises, I’ve now learned to use different ones for different feelings and situations. If I wish to internally discover my inner feelings of anxiety, I have to always choose an exercise that contains repetitive actions, and it cannot involve much conscious/forced thinking. Mindfulness colouring is usually a suitable activity for this. Though I have to make sure that I’m colouring a section which doesn’t require me to frequently change pencils.
Whilst colouring a large section, where a single pencil just moves up and down (as well as side to side) for 20 minutes, I become fully immersed into my feelings. This exercise doesn’t involve much conscious thinking. However a lot involuntary thoughts, self-talk and self-reflection always come to the surface of my mind as I’m idly colouring.
Thus I’ve now learned that the mind needs to be active every day for good brain health. Yet a healthy mind also needs to temporarily slow down off from time to time, in order to “download” new information and to give its “muscles” a chance to strengthen.
Whenever I feel overloaded and that I need to do a mindfulness exercise, I metaphorically hear various musical instruments making a disorderly mess of sound. Though once I’m fully grounded after doing an exercise, it’s very much like hearing a string quartet playing a beautiful masterpiece, in perfect key and rhythm.