When Crisis Feels Personal: How to Respond With Mindfulness & Kindness

By Barbara Gibson and Kim Frndak

When Crisis Feels Personal - How to Respond with Mindfulness & Kindness is made up of eleven chapters/lessons. These chapters provide readers with an introduction to the practice of mindfulness. The book is written primarily for use with women whose lives have been affected by domestic violence and its aftermath. However, these ideas and practices can be beneficial to anyone who seeks to have a stable mind even in the midst of extremely challenging circumstances.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543910469

Book preview

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Chapter 1

Mindfulness: What Is It?

Opening up to the moment

Remember the first time you rode a bike? Because the experience was so new, chances are all your attention was focused on each moment. You noticed the pressure of your feet on the pedals, the grip of your hands on the bars, even the tingle of cool air or warmth of the sun on your skin. You probably weren’t thinking about what you wanted for dinner or why your sister gave you that funny look at breakfast. That is what mindfulness is about — noticing — being open and fully present in the moment.

Being mindful allows us to experience the moment more fully because our minds and bodies are sharing a common experience. That’s different from how we are most often, when our bodies are doing one thing – say, having lunch with a friend — while our minds are doing something else, maybe thinking about a meeting or what we should have said during that argument last night. Being mindful is about bringing your whole self to the experience of now. When we do this, we are not thinking about the past or worrying and wondering about the future. We are available to whatever is happening now.

Placing the focus outside of the present causes us to miss the big and small details that enrich our lives. These small experiences like seeing the light in our child’s eye or the beauty of a fall day can add to our sense of joy and gratitude despite what may be going on in our lives. Taking the time to notice now can also help us reduce stress and feelings of overwhelm by giving our minds a break. That’s because we are not focusing on every single thing that is happening in our lives – only right now.

Cultivating mindfulness

Being mindful is as simple as noticing what is happening both internally (how am I feeling? what do I need?) as well as externally (what do I see and hear?). For most of us, staying focused when we are doing something exciting or fresh is fairly easy.

Think about the difference between being lost on an unfamiliar route and moving along one you have traveled dozens of times before. When traveling the familiar route, we usually arrive at home almost as if on auto-pilot. Most days we don’t notice much of the road, sky, trees or even the other people or cars. On the unfamiliar route, we become so focused on finding our way that even the car radio or other conversations may feel like distractions.

The task of mindfulness is to give attention, even when the thing we are doing – showering, eating, driving, talking with others – is something we have done countless times before. When we are not present in the moment or being mindful, we check out. We don’t notice the silkiness of the soap or the warmth of the water in the shower because we are too busy thinking about the day ahead. We don’t hear what our friend is saying because we are planning what we want to say in response. We are only partially aware of what is going on around us now because our attention is constantly bouncing between what happened before, what we worry might happen and what we want to happen next. All that bouncing around can leave us feeling off balance and overwhelmed.

Training the mind to slow down and be still takes time and practice, but don’t worry. Slowing the mind, or learning to be with the moment doesn’t mean we will walk around like zombies. In fact, the present moment awareness that comes with cultivating mindfulness