Happy September! I thank all of you who sent prayers and words of support for our daughter Danielle as she recovers from surgery. I directed my mind to touch on each person who commented on my Facebook page, allowing their prayers to enter my heart. That helped me feel loved and cared for when she was in surgery. It calmed me down, knowing people who I care about were sending healing wishes to us. That was an intentional tool, asking for prayers and then allowing the prayers to raise me up and hold me in love.
September is Self-Care Awareness Month and includes Mindfulness Day September 12. Mindfulness and self-care go together, like two wings of a bird. This is evident in the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) course and adaptations that I teach.
MSC has been shown to reduce anxiety and depression and help people make better choices, such as eating healthy, exercising, and getting enough sleep. In my courses and workshops, I also add elements of positive neuroplasticity training (PNT), which rewires the brain for happiness and resilience. I pack all those components into my curriculum and workshops to help people get the most bang for the buck!
Many years ago I experienced how mindfulness, self-compassion, therapy, and medication helped alleviate depression. Since then, the research keeps piling up on how mindfulness works.
The latest evidence comes in a study published in the British Journal of Health Psychology. Researchers at the universities of Bath and Southampton showed that practicing mindfulness just 10 minutes daily enhances well-being, alleviates depression and anxiety, and increases motivation to adopt healthier lifestyle habits. The many benefits participants mentioned included increased patience, gratitude, and self-awareness.
I remember learning that 12 minutes of mindfulness meditation is the minimum to get all the benefits, but this study shows that even 10 minutes daily can be helpful. Most of the meditations on my free Balanced Mind with Julie Potiker podcast range from 15 to 20 minutes, with the bonus that each one ends with a poem!
No matter how much time you spend practicing mindfulness, remember to practice even when you don’t need it so that you can use it when you need it most. The best way to do that is to incorporate mindfulness into your daily life. I’ve been singing the same song for 10 years, but when the student is ready, the teaching arrives… again!
People usually come to mindfulness when they are suffering in some way — when they feel overwhelmed, burned-out, stressed-out, or are grieving. Sometimes it takes pain to motivate us to take the time to learn the practices to alleviate our suffering. It’s fabulous that there’s so much within our power that we can do to improve the quality and quantity of our one and only precious life!
This excerpt from my soon-to-be-announced poetry book sums up my relationship with self-care:
Self-care is in my spine, stamped in my vertebrae after a decade of teaching mindful self-compassion. It keeps my skeleton from collapsing in a heap on the earth when disaster strikes. It raises me a little taller when joy, awe, or ecstasy bursts out of me like a hose at a five-alarm fire. It saved my life, this practice of seeing and allowing all of me, the jagged and sticky bits included. It orients me to a wider lens, my feet in other shoes, with an impulse to help, if I can. The nuts-and-bolts change based on circumstance, but there are constants – the breath, feet rooted on solid ground, hand on heart, prayers spooling out, connecting with people who love me and whom I love, and remembering I belong, I am enough, I am complete, and so are you.
Wishing you a safe and happy Self-Care Awareness Month and Mindfulness Day! May it be a life full of self-care and mindfulness, each and every day, for all of us!
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