Michelle Pearce, LPC, RN, D.Min shares her thoughts on Mindfulness.

              Any and every common task or chore can be used to deepen moment to moment awareness and fully bring into focus the experience and flowering of the senses. I decided to experiment with the ‘dreaded’ laundry folding because I found myself so impatient with it. I hated doing it. It seemed like I spent 20 minutes folding laundry only to have my kids demolish my hard work within seconds, literally seconds. All the time I was folding the laundry I’d be ruminating about the kids demolishing my work and that inevitably led to a cascade of ruminating thoughts about how my kids were ungrateful, how I did too much and they didn’t do enough, how many other things I had to do, how little time I had, and back to how much I hated folding laundry. As this ruminating about how awful life is (and my kids, they are really great, I promise) was going on, my body was reacting with tension and emotions of frustration and anger and impatience. My mood lowered and this lower mood in turn stimulated more “mood-congruent” thoughts and memories that justified my having a lower mood. In short, anything else that had recently happened that had resulted in frustration, anger, or impatience was dredged from the dark halls of memory by the ruminating mind and paraded around for full inspection in my mind. All that from folding laundry!

             I remember the first time I decided I was willing to experiment with simply experiencing folding laundry. I did not force myself to do anything. (I had to anyway.) I simply set my intention to fully experience each moment of it, even if it was the experience of hating it. Imagine my surprise when my experiment yielded the result of actually enjoying folding laundry?!? How could this be? When I actually opened myself to the experience of my senses when folding laundry, rather than to my ruminating mind, my experience of it changed. I noticed how each piece of clothing had a different texture to it. Some were soft and smooth. Others were looser weave and more rough. I then noticed how the laundry room smelt of laundry soap and dryer fresheners. I noticed how it felt warm and it was cozy in there. I noticed the relative silence. Then I noticed how I felt more relaxed and it felt like I was cheating somehow. (Wasn’t doing laundry supposed to be awful?) I was getting a break from my long to do list and simply standing there enjoying the feel of the clothes, the smells, the warmth, and the moment to moment experience. Fascinating!

             Our moment to moment experience can easily be transformed and the mundane transported to a place of simple peace and awareness when we let our experience be of our senses rather than focusing on the ruminating mind (with all the ruminating mind has to tell us about how we….shoulda, coulda, oughta…. And so on and so on). This is the practice of mindfulness in a nutshell. It turns out that the ruminating mind is not me and it is not you. (Sometimes, in my less tolerant and more playful moods, I call it “the tyrant”.)

              You are invited to join us as we talk about and go deeper into this experience of the ruminating mind (AKA, the tyrant). Maybe we’ll let it have free reign and be the curious observer, saying to ourselves, isn’t that fascinating? Look at what our minds can do!

To learn more, please join our Mindful Living Class every Thursday evening from 5:30 - 6:30pm!