Mindful March: Day 23 and 24

Day 23

Mindful eating
We’ve tried with a mindful snack, now we’re going to try to be mindful with a whole meal.

How to do it
Choose one meal today to be mindful in. Put your phone away and instead fully focus on everything about your meal – the different tastes and textures. What it’s like when you slow down? The mind may well try and distract you and get you to do something else, but each time you notice you’ve got distracted, come back to the smell, taste, colours, texture of your food.

Reflection
● How difficult was this for you?
● Do you usually just focus on your food or are you always eating on the go or while doing something else?
● What difference did it make to focus just on your food on this way?

Day 24

Choose your anchor meditation
With mindful meditation, we often choose an anchor to focus on. An anchor is something concrete we can rest the attention onto, and something that we can bring our attention back to once we noticed it’s wandered (which it will!). The breath is probably the most common anchor, but we can also focus on the tangible sensations of our body resting on the chair, or focus our attention on what we can hear in our surroundings.

How to do it
Try out this “choose your anchor meditation” to see which anchor might suit you best. Bring some curiosity to the experience – as if you’ve never noticed those things before – and don’t forget to be kind to yourself if it’s challenging.

Audio for if you want to be guided through.

Don’t worry about ‘emptying’ the mind, simply see if you can focus the attention on the anchor and if the mind wanders – that’s okay – bring the mind back to your anchor once you notice that’s happened.

Reflection
● How did you find this meditation?
● Was it harder than the shorter meditation we did earlier in the month – perhaps it was easier?
● Did you notice any particular persistent thoughts?
● Was your mind very busy, or quite calm?

Remember that we’re not trying to empty the mind of thoughts – but just to notice when we get distracted by them and they take them away from our chosen anchor.

Find out more about Mindful March.