Mindfulness Tools and Tips

By: Julie Peatt-Cassaday

Why Mindfulness? 

I can describe in one word the nature of most individuals in today’s culture: overstimulated. We stay busy at work and at home checking emails, keeping up with social media, following 24-hour news and entertainment, and communicating with friends and family by way of texting. Our minds easily feel overwhelmed and cluttered with all the details, many of which we are unaware of. 

How do we as a society intend to keep up this ridiculous pace without some sort of fallout or consequence? No intention in the world could support this lifestyle, not for long anyway. 

Allow me to introduce the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness seems to be rising from the vapors, sounding like some New Age prescription full of mysticism and, perhaps, feeling out of reach for most. Maybe we are just too busy to take the time to fully understand mindfulness and really allow it to seep into the cracks of our day-to-day “busy-ness” to support our health and sanity. 

Let’s take a minute to de-mystify mindfulness. At its very foundational level, mindfulness is simply becoming aware of your thoughts, playing the observer to the thoughts you generate and noticing the emotional impact of each, and paying attention to thinking patterns and the emotions assigned to those thoughts. That is mindfulness. To use mindfulness for your greater good, it is best to retain those thoughts that are positive in nature and release those that are negative or out of your control. 

So Why Is This Important? 

Consider that everything is energy. The trees, buildings, furniture and we ourselves consist of energy. Energy is in motion, and it holds a vibration that emits a frequency. Positive thoughts create a vibration that sends out a high frequency into the world, and negative thoughts create a vibration that sends out a low frequency. Consider how your body and your energy feel when you are pumped up, happy and when you feel excited to engage in your day—this is high frequency. Conversely, when you feel sad, angry or depressed, you could describe yourself as being in a low emotional state with low energy, thus corresponding to a low frequency. 

“That’s cool, but who cares and what does it do for me?” you may be asking. It’s actually the frequency itself that matters and here’s why. The Universal Law of Attraction, just like the Law of Gravity, is the passive rule also at play here. The Law states that whatever frequency we send out we attract back to ourselves. So if we are focused on high-frequency thoughts, we will attract more of those experiences to us. The same is true with negative thoughts. 

Now tell me, where do you want to be focused?