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Tag Archives: mindfulness

Learning to be here now: Be present in your life

25 Monday Apr 2016

Posted by kristinmaiorano in Bettering Myself, What Inspires Me

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challenges, inspiration, mantra, mindfulness, self-improvement

As I sat in the dental chair today, the hygienist told me the dentist would be a few minutes.

“Do you want a magazine?” she asked. “Or do you want to look at your phone while you wait?”

“No, thank you,” I smiled. “I’ll just relax and look out the window.”

She looked shocked, like simply sitting in a chair and looking out the window was the craziest thing a person could think to do. With all the distractions in our lives these days, maybe it is.

The hygienist, Mia, and I ended up having a pleasant conversation about the warmer weather and all the work she had to do with her garden. I told her about my foray into planting herbs on my back patio, and she told me how she loved to race home from work on Fridays to mow the lawn. I felt prouder than I should have that I chose to get to know Mia, rather than assume my typical position, with my nose buried in my iPhone.

I carried that feeling with me on the way home. Instead of stewing over the day’s work frustrations or plotting out what I had to do for the rest of the day, I soaked up the music I was playing, stuck my arm out the window, and enjoyed the feeling of the wind sliding through my fingertips.

Maybe it’s no coincidence that I received a package earlier in the day of the “Be Here Now” shirt that I ordered from Tiny Buddha. To be completely honest, I’ve never read the book by Ram Dass (though it’s on my list!). I’ve always kind of thought there’s plenty we can learn just by reading the cover, right? So with you as my witness, I’m vowing now that “Be Here Now” is my new spring mantra.

beherenow

A little “Be Here Now” inspiration from Tiny Buddha

Because the truth is, while the version of me that looks out dentist office windows and drives with her hand floating in the wind seems so peaceful and zen, that’s the version of me that’s usually hard to find. More typically, I’m the woman who’s watching TV while texting while skimming Facebook. I’m the woman whose cell phone is the last thing she looks at before she goes to sleep and the first thing she reaches for when she wakes up. I’m the woman who often can’t stand sitting still for more than a few minutes without biting at a cuticle or picking at a split end.

I can blame it on the nature of my job–it’s definitely not unusual to find me writing a script, making a graphic, and talking to a reporter at the same time–but I know that the “Be Here Now” concept is tough to grasp for most of the people in my life. Who knew it would take so much work to embrace silence, simplicity, or merely focusing on the task at hand?

So starting today, I will savor silence. I will pursue peace. I will Do. One. Thing. At. A. Time. (Gasp!) I will wake up and give myself a few seconds to stretch before I even THINK about checking my email. I will enjoy nature. I will give people my full attention. When I inevitably fall back into my old habits, I will lather, rinse, and repeat.

This is the spring of “being here now.” And while I’m at it… maybe I’ll even pick up some Ram Dass.

Fall resolutions, part three: Feeling fulfilled in my free time

16 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by kristinmaiorano in Bettering Myself, Life Lessons

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challenges, fulfillment, mindfulness, resolution, self care, self-improvement

This month I’ve been doing my best to better myself, as fall has always felt more like “New Year’s” to me than January 1. Each week I’ve been rolling out a new “fall resolution”: First I slightly improved my listening skills, and the past week has been an uphill battle against my bad habit of complaining a lot.

So for Week Three I decided to focus in on my free time. It occurred to me recently that my energy level is very dependent on how I spend my time after work. (Work has its own effects, but that’s a different post for a different day.) This realization struck me at the end of a particularly long stretch of Netflix binge watching, in which for several weeks my extra hours mostly consisted of watching 3-5 reruns of “Gilmore Girls” each day. I had been racing toward the finale, and when I got there I was surprised to feel unfulfilled–like, just-wasted-several-weeks-of-my-life unfulfilled.

Don’t get me wrong. I am one of the world’s biggest proponents of laziness, relaxation, Me Time, and the merits of a beautiful slothful day spent glued to the couch. But string a few weeks of those days together and I realized it wasn’t how I enjoyed spending all my time.

I look at it like this: It’s like when you come home from a week-long vacation where you ate every meal at a restaurant or a fast-food joint. As much as you say you wish you could get away with eating like that all the time, you strangely find yourself turned off by the idea of eating one more meal out, and all you want to eat is a gigantic salad. (I am not an avid consumer of healthy food, and yes, this has happened to me.)

After my aforementioned binge-watch extravaganza, I saw that you can crave healthier, more fulfilling activities in the same way you crave healthier, more fulfilling food.

So I decided to make two lists. The first is a list of things that make me feel productive and fulfilled:

  1. Getting creative: Playing music, writing in whatever way I can, even doodling or folding a fortune teller out of a piece of paper!
  2. Getting active: My exercises of choice are running, walking and yoga, but even playing around with the dogs gets my energy level up.
  3. Getting outside: Easily combined with number 2! I feel so much more positive on days when I can squeeze in a walk or spend time by Lake Michigan, just a few blocks from where I live.
  4. Getting a laugh: To me, laughter is one of the greatest things in life. I get so much joy out of joking around with friends, watching standup comedy, or simply checking out the latest viral videos.
  5. Exploring something new: Lately when I do turn to Netflix, I’m not mindlessly watching hours of one show while I play around on my phone. I’m turning on some “classic” and “must-see” movies that I’ve always wanted to watch. I’ve also been turning to the internet to read up on people or pieces of history I don’t know much about, and perusing bands on Spotify that I’ve been wanting to check out.
  6. Reading: I’m sure many avid readers will agree, reading just seems so much more fulfilling than watching something on TV. Maybe it’s activating your imagination and feeling like you’re doing more work for your entertainment. Whatever it is, it feels like time well spent.
  7. Getting enough sleep: This has become a tough one for me since I started working overnights. But I feel like pushing myself to get enough hours of sleep every “night” (day) is the most basic way to start with self-care.
  8. Doing nothing, actively: There’s a difference between mindlessly staring at a screen for hours and sitting in silence, listening to your thoughts. Whenever I’m consistently practicing meditation and mindfulness I feel much calmer and more at peace.
This meditative dog could teach me a thing or two about fulfillment.

This meditative dog could teach me a thing or two about fulfillment.

So after listing out the things that make me feel fulfilled, my second list is (you guessed it!) the things that drag me down:

  1. Spending hours in front of the TV: Half the time I have one or more other screens to distract me, anyway.
  2. Obsessively checking social media: I know it’s a big part of a lot of our jobs, but I’m not gaining anything from logging on 500 times a day, especially when it feels like I’m just reading about how everyone’s out having fun but me.
  3. Playing games on my phone: Candy Crush will be the death of me.
  4. Putting off my chores: Watching dishes and unfolded laundry pile up seems to cause me anxiety and make me feel bad about myself.
  5. Complaining: I know, I’m working on tackling this bad habit. But every time it rears its ugly head it just makes me feel worse about whatever it is I’m complaining about.

Now that I’ve made my two lists, this week’s resolution is simple: More of List One and less of List Two. More specifically, my goal is to do at least one thing from the first list every day (ideally several), and reduce the second list as much as I can.

Weigh in: How do you find fulfillment in your free time?

Talking is easy; Listening is hard

02 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by kristinmaiorano in Life Lessons

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

challenges, lessons, listening, mindfulness

January never really feels like a new year to me. Hunkering down in the cold, it feels more like the middle of a hibernation period than a time for change. This, right now, is when there’s a buzz in the air, when it feels like everyone is turning over a new leaf.

I’m sure it has a lot to do with the fact that for 20 years, every fall was the start of a new school year–new classes, new friends, new routines. And even now, six years since my last first day of school, the signs of a new start are all around. Although instead of commiserating with fellow students, it’s with my friends and family who are parents and teachers.

So in the spirit of starting fresh, and because I didn’t really have a resolution for 2015, I’m going to spend this month fine tuning some personal goals. Each week I will pick something I want to work on, and that will be my focus. This week, I’m starting with a skill that seems so simple, but is much trickier in practice; I’m working on learning to listen.

You see, I work in an industry that often requires urgent and up-to-the-minute information to be passed along, and that often requires cutting off whomever in mid-sentence to do it. And I was raised in a family filled with outgoing and opinionated people. We are a lovely, kindhearted bunch; we just like to participate. Put these two things together, and it can hardly be considered my fault that I’ve evolved into a well-intentioned rambler with a horrible habit of interrupting. (This habit drives my boyfriend nuts, by the way.)

Recently, I started trying to be mindful of how often I’m cutting off people in conversations. Spoiler alert: it is a lot. I interrupt my coworkers, my family, my friends, and of course, my aforementioned boyfriend. I’m now trying to take that a step further, and be mindful of even the urge to jump in when someone’s talking. (It’s slow going.)

listeningsloth

But in all these efforts to watch out for listening faux pas, I’ve noticed something else: I’m getting interrupted a whole lot too. I’ve found myself getting annoyed when people cut me off, trying to answer a question I wasn’t asking or not even waiting long enough to hear my point. Turns out, it’s every man for himself out there!

I love the Stephen R. Covey quote, “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” That is the ultimate goal this week–approach conversation as a two-way street where I have as much to learn as I have to share.

Any tips from good listeners out there?

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