Tuesday Thoughts: Mindfulness with Kat

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My school has ended for the summer, Convergence has come and gone, the teenager is out of school for the summer, and now I finally have a moment to breathe. While I haven’t been writing as much, I have still been focusing on mindfulness and how to incorporate it into my life outside of my yoga practice. Last week, a friend of mine posted a phone challenge. He challenged folks who chose to participate to not bring their phones with them during the week – rather, to leave them at home. I had all kinds of reasons about why that wouldn’t work for me or my lifestyle:

  1. My cell phone is my work phone and my personal phone.
  2. I have kids. I need to be gotten ahold of if there’s an issue.
  3. What if something happened and someone needed to reach me? But I didn’t have my phone?

What then?

But, it’s been sitting in my brain and my thoughts keep coming back to it. One of my goals in looking at mindfulness, I have realized over the last few months, is that I want to be able to just exist with my feelings – even the really hard ones like anxiety, depression, boredom, etc. -without the easy out of a phone game, or Facebook, to zone out to. Facebook is increasingly adding to my anxiety anyway, and I’m wanting to do more with my time – it’s super easy for me to get sucked into games or Tumblr or whatever. So, I’m going to experiment this month and I’ll report back next month. Feel free to experiment along with me and let me know what happens!

Rules

  1. On Phone Only Days – only using phone for email, texting, messaging. No games, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.
  2. I will have my phone WITH me because work and kids, but won’t check it beyond to answer phone calls and emails.
  3. Exceptions can be made to check events, etc. on fb but no reading fb.

    Week 1: 7/16 – 7/22: Two Days – Monday, Friday
    Week 2: 7/23 – 7/29: Three Days – Monday, Wednesday, Friday
    Week 3: 7/30 – 8/05: Four Days – Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday
    Week 4: 8/06 – 8/12: Five Days – Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday

I hope you join me in this experiment! Let’s talk more in a few weeks!

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Kat is a yoga teacher (RYT200), student, partner, mother, and all- around badass woman. She is honored to share her thoughts with her YogaQuest Community.