Moment of Mind August 2019 – Finding Mindful Now

Image of Japanese Gardens in Portland, Oregon. Meditation rock garden showing moss in the center of concentric circles raked into the small rocks in foreground. Shrubs and trees in the background.

Moment of Mind

Look Underneath Your Thinking

In mindfulness we’re using our attention to notice our moment to moment lived experience – to be with it, rather than being yanked around by our changing thinking. Finding Mindful Now is about starting with a mindfulness practice and then seeing the capacity for us to tune in and be present with life more of the time – whatever we are up to. Too often we can get caught up in our thoughts and lose ourself in the stream of thinking, even when we’re out on a health-promoting hike or a long walk. Luckily, presence is always here waiting to be rediscovered.

When you next notice your thinking mind pressed up against the window of whatever the topic is…this is your aware self gently reminding you that you can take a pause. If you’re out on a hike and find yourself stomping as your mind hammers out thoughts, you can explore intentionally lifting and placing your feet, slowing your steps down. If you’re at work and you find your chest is tight, you can take a long, deep breath and close your eyes, feeling into your lungs as they expand. The chatty mind might continue to swirl a bit…that’s okay. It’s what minds do.

When you lift the lid on all this mind chatter, your aware self is underneath, fueled by the steady beat of life moving through you. The brain-body is innocently sending thoughts to your aware self all the time, “is this important? how about this? what about that?” – it doesn’t always know. It’s sending you predictions based on your prior experiences and current perceptions (see this great video for a description of one aspect of how our brain-body works based on the theory of constructed emotion). Your awareness is always in the background, underneath conceptual thinking.

Mindfulness helps you tune into your forgotten innate wisdom that is life energy inside. To me it feels like natural stability beneath the shifting and constantly changing, mind.

Love For Your Inner Science Nerd

Study Finds Mindfulness Walks Reduce Stress

Finding Mindful Now’s nature-based mindfulness walks are designed based on stress reduction research, mindfulness, and the reported health benefits of being outdoors. One study in 2013 randomly assigned people reporting mild to moderate psychological distress to participate in a twice weekly guided mindfulness walking group and compared outcomes to those randomly assigned to be in a waiting (or “control”) group.
People that attended 8 sessions of a walking group including a guided mindfulness practice reported a significant reduction in stress and better quality of life after just 4 weeks compared to those who did not attend the guided mindfulness walks.
The study used hour-long walks including exercise warm ups and cool downs where 10 minutes of each session was focused on mindful walking and 10 minutes was spent on discussion time. Researchers concluded, “our data suggests that it is necessary to continuously practice mindful walking to obtain the best effects. However, only 5 participants of the intervention group kept on practicing regularly after the end of the intervention period although it was recommended to continue practicing.”
Finding Mindful Now’s guided walks are more mindfulness-practice intensive, where approximately 30 minutes of a 1 hour walk includes trying on different mindful walking approaches with discussion between each one to reinforce what we notice. We are planning to offer a walking series that supports both guided practice and people learning to take turns providing guidance to each other as a tool in building a mindful walking practice.
Haven’t been on one yet? Head over to our listing on AirBnB experiences to attend a public walk, or send us a request for a tailored one-on-one or smaller group event!

Get Your Park Groove On

Our brain-bodies have a deep affinity for being in nature. This may be part of why research continues to reveal the health benefits of the Japanese practice of Shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing. I’ve been scouting local forested parks looking for contenders for future forest bathing-focused walks.

Friends of mine, including two members of the younger set under the age of 13, checked out Metro’s Canemah Bluff in Oregon City recently. The ~332 acreage overlooks Willamette Falls and was a canoe portage site for indigenous communities, particularly Chinook before the European-settler take over (learn more about original land residents here). I recommend the forested section for a quiet, less trafficked, walk among Douglas fir trees or oak with trails that include stream-side moments. There is an ADA accessible trail with a view of the river that is tremendous. One delightful, and unexpected, benefit that the younger ones gave 4.5/5 stars was the nature-element inspired playground (the Canemah Children’s Park), managed by Oregon City. The playground pulled all of us in with its climbable “boulder” feature that let us hop onto a rotating “log.” While these were plastic copies, the felt nearly as fun as the real thing.

Image of water plants in a lake with lily pads in the foreground and trees in the background.

Groove is something I do to nature sounds. Next time you’re out in the wild, see if you can hear a beat in the rhythm of a frog call or cricket song. This image is from Twin Lakes, Connecticut where dragonfly buzzes remind me of techno beats. Presence is always underneath thinking!