Morning Mindfulness 21 (Week)Day Challenge!

Hi! I hope that everyone is well and staying warm!

I am very excited about this Morning Mindfulness Challenge… I’ll tell you all about it!

As you may have seen in a previous blog post, I am currently enrolled (I took a break and am now revisiting) in Yale’s Science of Well-Being course on Coursera. I really enjoy the course and over the past few months (as I said, it’s taken me a while), we have learned about the things we THINK we make us happy versus the daily sort of habits like kindness, gratitude, exercise, sleep and meditation that actually DO make us happy.

I have been wanting to create a regular meditation and/or journaling practice for a while now but have not been able to stay consistent. During Week 6 of the Yale course, Professor Santos discussed the importance of situation support. She says that the situations we find ourselves in, whether it’s the people we are around, the items in our space or the environment we are in, affect us in ways we don’t even realize! This makes a lot of sense to me. She gives an example of food on the kitchen counter: If the counter is filled with chips and cookies and our goal is to be healthy, this is NOT a supportive situation. A bowl of grapes and oranges, however, create a situation that can help us to eat better.

Thinking about this and my particular goal of meditation and another goal I have, the desire to build a community of people around me who can provide situation support, I had an idea to start a Morning Mindfulness Challenge with people in my building. The Calm meditation app has a “21 days of Calm” series with guided meditations each day, so my idea is to bring people in my apartment building together in a common space every morning at… ehhh… 6:45 am.

Getting up this early every day is going to be HARD but I really do feel that by just sending the email (even if no one else commits to coming every day or ANY day, I am creating situation support and holding myself accountable. I also made these little calendars for us to keep track of the days that we did meditate. On the flip side are journaling questions about your “WHY?” for the challenge: Why do you want to start meditating more? How can you visualize this impacting your life?

I think put a question, something that the Yale course teaches we can apply to any problem in our lives, about the obstacles we imagine that could get in the way of us reaching our goal. The philosophy behind this is, if we envision these obstacles and then also plan for how we can overcome them, then we are more prepared to reach our goals.

Tomorrow is Day 1 of the challenge and it will go for the next 21 business days (minus one when I am away). I am excited to write about it here to discuss how it’s going and I’m also excited to see the end results of how it feels to regularly meditate and journal and how it feels to REACH A GOAL that I think is important to my overall joy and happiness.

Feel free to join in and let me know how it goes!!!

Warmly,
Christina