mindful living

My two core fundamentals to Mindful Living

Earlier this year, my life got rocked to the core. My beautiful mother went from being pretty independent to having two falls (she’d never had a fall and these were just one week apart), two hospital stays, then subsequently died in late February.

I now understand from a very visceral sense how grief can hit hard.

It was super hard.

Apart from having to organize a covid-restriction-imposed funeral to channel my energy-zapped focus, two things above all else helped ground me during that haze:

1. My mindfulness practice

…and

2. My daily exercise

I was back on my meditation stool and back at the gym the morning after my mother died. From my work and all I’ve learned, I knew just how important it was to stick to a routine in tough times. Two quotes stood out for me… Phil Stutz: “the worse you feel, the more you need to commit to your protocol” (aka morning routine) and notable child Psychologist, Haim Ginott, “When a person is drowning, it is not a good time to teach him to swim”.

I knew I was “drowning”. The first two weeks after my mother died, it was like being in a time-warp, and going through quick-sand. I knew I had to draw on my life-raft. My life-raft was my morning routine of mindfulness meditation and exercise. I’m super glad that I had that routine firmly in place long before I really needed it. And it has come in handy in the past on a number of occasions.

BTW that morning after, I wasn’t exactly wanting to do these things. But I knew that I had to – it was going to be the only way to get through this and out the other side. I knew it was that important to just show up.

How about you? Do you know what your grounding habits are? And do you work with them regularly? Or do you think you’ll be scrambling to put a life-raft in place when you really need one? In other words, are you going to wing it? Or are you going to be prepared for the inevitable curveball that life is going to throw you?