by Paul Bates
Contributing Author, Conscious Reminder
Mindfulness is a concept that has gathered considerable momentum in the past few years. As environmental sustainability becomes more prominent, mindfulness is a quality that has been called for in all inhabitants of our planet.
This is just one area in life where mindfulness is becoming more prominent. How can one achieve mindfulness? Writing offers a good tool for achieving mindfulness. How can one use writing to achieve mindfulness?
Physical Thought Journal
Thought journals are useful tools to help an individual explore their personality and identity. Through this process, you can identify your weaknesses and strengths and chart a potential path to achieving an ideal version of yourself. One of the most effective ways to develop self-awareness is to document your thoughts, helping you keep track of what occupies your mental energy. “A thought journal can help you identify underlying patterns that can signal philosophies, ideologies, or principles and values that influence and guide your thought process,” says Anna Stanfield, creative writer at APA Style Writing. Achieving this level of awareness is vital to achieve mindfulness.
In an increasingly digitalized world, e-journals offer a seemingly efficient alternative. Since most of us are used to our keyboards, this may seem like a good idea at first. However, a physical journal, made out of paper, offers a better alternative for creativity purposes. A significant difference exists between the experiences you get when you write your thoughts down on paper using paper. Something almost nostalgic about pen and paper provides you with better creativity. Handwritten thoughts require patience, a valuable asset for nurturing creativity and critical thinking.
Free Writing
In our daily lives, we have familiarized ourselves with formal writing since it serves a significant part of our lives. Our livelihoods essentially revolve our formal writing and communication back and forth. However, achieving mindfulness requires you to go beyond the formal and embrace a free form of writing. “Free writing involves setting a timer, say ten minutes, and taking a pen and paper and writing whatever comes to your mind,” notes Michelle Higgins, Senior Editorial Writer at ConfidentWriters. Free writing is not an easy skill to develop since your thoughts will probably be all over the place at the first attempt, or you may even draw a blank. However, with time, this skill can be improved and mastered, allowing you to realize another level of freedom and creativity required for mindfulness.
Write Outdoors
Experience is one of the greatest teachers and it provides the best opportunities to realize and achieve mindfulness. A person who is aware of their environment can better realize mindfulness than one who is not. The outdoors provides you with an opportunity to see how people interact with people, plants, animals, technology, and development. Understanding how these factors are linked to create your perception of reality is vital to achieving mindfulness. As such, with every opportunity you get, take a walk to the park or through a street or shopping mall and just observe. You can even sit, observe, and write about what you see, emotions that each scene evokes, and what you feel about these experiences. According to Charlie Preston, Head of Content Writing at Example Papers, “writing outdoors can be a useful tool to using writing to realize mindfulness.”
Travel Outside Your City
Building on the previous point, writing outdoors, your city can limit the type of experiences you can have. One good alternative is traveling outside your city; if possible, to a location or country of a different culture and language. While staying at home may create the illusion that you have a perfect world, experiencing different cultures where you have little in common can help you understand how the world is a much larger place and your world may not be as significant as you think. Interacting with other culture can help you better understand and appreciate common luxuries, values, and beliefs that exist in your own culture. Writing about these experiences is a useful tool to help you reflect about the differences in the way you perceive life before and after these interactions.
About the Author: Paul Bates is a healthcare content writer at SwiftPapers.com and DedicatedWriters.com. Also, Paul contributes articles on health care topics to Medium and HuffPost.
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