Practice 6 - Meditation

To practice:

# Sit quietly for at least 10 minutes a day. Slowly increase duration to 20 minutes. Try to do unguided meditation by focusing on your breath, physical sensations in the body or the sounds around you. Set time aside to do this every single day without fail. Keep a journal to record your experiences.

# If you find unguided meditation difficult then begin with guided meditation. You can look for guided meditation on apps such as headspace and insight timer. You can also use the "Breathing App", and practice resonance breathing on it as a way of meditation. 

#consciousliving #practice6 #Meditation

Practice 5 - Self love

Here are some ways in which we can cultivate self love :-

A. Keep a journal where you key in all the things you love and appreciate about yourself on a daily basis. Look at penning down at least 3 each day.

B. Cultivate a loving acceptance of yourself even in times that you end up behaving badly. Forgive yourself and do whatever that you can to nurture yourself.

C. Everyday make it a point to do one task you truly enjoy doing. It could be reading or listening to your favorite song or anything else that uplifts your mood.

D. Start doing the "Mirror image exercise" which involves you looking at yourself in the mirror and telling yourself " I love you". Might seem odd at first, but just keep at it.

#consciousliving #practice5 #selflove

Practice 4 - Express Gratitude

# Start a formal practice of penning down 3 things to be grateful for every single day.

# Apart from a formal practice, make it a habit to mentally thank every little thing that makes your life beautiful 🌸🙂

# Express gratitude for the food on your plate

# Express gratitude for the clean water 

# Express gratitude for the clothes you get to wear 

# Express gratitude for the roof over your head

# Express gratitude for your family 

# Express gratitude for your education 

# Express gratitude for your work 

Keep doing this, and notice if expressing gratitude often makes you complain a little less🙂🌸💕🙏

#consciousliving #practice4 #gratitude

Practice 3 - Create Mindful Moments

To put this into practice, 

# Consciously choose an activity to give your entire attention to. Choose an everyday daily activity such as brushing or bathing. Involve all of your senses into the activity - see what you are seeing, hear what you are hearing, feel what you are feeling, taste what you are tasting, smell what you are smelling. Be completely present.

Continue this complete presence with the activity for several days, till it becomes second nature.

Now, slowly start adding more daily activities to give your complete attention.

Notice how bringing a greater awareness to your daily activities changes the quality of what you are doing and also how it frees your mind from unnecessary mental chatter.

# You can use mindful presence every time there is too much going on in your mind and you want to take a break from mental chatter that's adding to your stress. Just drop everything and focus on what's around you at the moment. Use this as a tool to help you cope with stress induced by too much thinking.

# Practice mindful eating with all your daily meals. Do this by chewing your food slowly and fully, paying attention to the colors, textures and tastes on your plate, and expressing gratitude to all the people who played a role in bringing the food onto your plate 🙂 Focus on your meal and avoid idle conversations.

#Consciousliving #practice 3 #mindfulmoments

Practice 2 - Relax

To apply practice 2 into your daily life:

# As often as possible, perform body scan to identify areas of tension in the body. Visualize releasing the tension with your out breath.

# When you feel tensed, fatigued, stressed just visualize your entire body engulfed in a beautiful golden or white light ( or any other color that you associate with relaxation ). As you inhale, imagine inhaling positive energy from this bubble of light and as you exhale, imagine letting go of tension, stress, fatigue, strain and anything that doesn't serve the purpose.

# Every time you feel triggered by outside circumstances, such as being stuck in a traffic or getting irritated because of the unreasonable behavior of your children or spouse, or just any other situation that triggers negative emotions in you, take 5 conscious breaths - 5 deep inhales and complete exhales. Respond to the trigger only after having done this. 

# End of each day, reflect on what triggered you negatively through the day, and how you responded to it. 

#consciousliving #practice2 #relax

Practice 1 - Smile Smile Smile 😊😊😊

Lets try to put the first of the conscious living practices into practice, by smiling more often. Here are some ways in which you can do that 😊🌸💕

#Wake up in the morning with a smile on your face😊 set your alarm 5 minutes before the usual time. Use this time to sit quietly on your bed, draw your awareness inward to your breath, add a slight smile to your lips, visualize a smiling heart and step out of bed. 

# It's possible that you miss doing this first thing in the morning 😊 in which case you can put a light smile on your face whenever you remember. Notice how even slight smile on your face allows your entire body to relax.   

# Especially when stepping out of the house, remain mindful of who you come across. Set an intention to share your smile with as many people as possible 😊 

# End of each day, reflect on who you shared your smile with, and how that made you feel.

#Consciousliving #practice1 #Smile  

Application of the practices into daily life

So now we have a total of 30 practices that, if applied, can help us live our lives with greater consciousness. Most of you would feel, that there is nothing new that you have learnt :-) and I contend with you on that. You all must have read these concepts in different forms - articles, motivational videos, podcasts, TED talks, books.

While we vehemently agree that they make sense and when applied can improve our lives and our state of mind, we fail to apply them regularly. And that's due to our forgetfulness and constant association with the external world, that places undue importance to outward accomplishments and appearances.

Today many individuals get educated to get a job and a 6 figure salary. That seems to be the priority. Moral values, consciousness of how ones action is impacting ones environment, role of kindness and compassion, honesty etc is not considered important and this is the reason why we have a world filled with dissatisfied people struggling to find ease and peace in their lives. 

A consciousness revolution is the need of the hour. The purpose of education cannot be to get a good job alone. The purpose of education should also be to help people find peace within and contribute to peace outside of themselves. 

It is never too late to start afresh and create positive actions that serve us and others. 

I sincerely hope, that I will have many people join me in this revolution of awakening to our true selves and being an instrument of peace and harmony through conscious living.

So far we have spoken about what these practices are. From hereon, our focus will be on how to apply these practices into our everyday life. 

As a first step, memorize the 30 practices. Having them in the back of your mind will help you recognize opportunities in your everyday life, to apply them, and experience the results, for yourself.