Being Mindful of being MindFULL

So I finally remembered something that I've been meaning to blog about. It is the whole notion of practising mindfulness. As you can imagine, I am most inept and have been trying all year to master the concept but with very little success. If truth be known,  I think I am becoming more absent minded as the days tick by. I do know one thing though for certain; I am excellent at reaching a state of mindFULLness.

HM says to go outside and sit peacefully in the backyard. Smell the herbs and watch the activity going on with the bee hives {Yes, we have 100,000 bees carrying on and busying themselves with their honey routine in our own backyard}. HM is able to go outside and watch the bees for AGES. Like a whole HOUR. I go out, I watch them for two minutes and then I am off thinking about a million things that need to be done. I am just incompetent when it comes to this Zen stuff and I think it is because I lost the ability to single task many, many, MANY moons ago. Long before the kids came along.

Like many people, my brain is busy. Active. Always thinking about something. It never stops. I try to calm it but so far I can't manage more than a minute or two of complete mindfulness. I've tried everything. Meditation, yoga, pilates, the aforementioned bees, lying on the beach. Even when I follow my mindfulness meditation app I still find room in there, especially when the sexy Scottish voice over pauses between instructions {I'm sure it's Sean Connery}, to ponder whether Hammerhead has a clean pair of school shorts to wear tomorrow and if there will be enough ham to make three rounds of school lunches.

When I watch a movie, I can't just focus on the plot. Oh no. I have to work out all the other movies that the actors were in. And bonus points if I can think of a movie in which two or more of the actors appeared in together. If there are no recognisable actors, then I'll try and work out what city the movie is set in or something--ANYTHING, to detour from the plot which I'll also manage to follow quite comprehensively. This habit of mine drives HM right up the wall. "Just focus on the movie", he says. "Who cares what they were in - this is what we are watching NOW". So I try to stay with the movie but it's only seconds before I start thinking about how I can go and look up IMDB and find out for certain. I should perhaps clarify here that I LOVE movies, particularly foreign ones, old ones and cult ones. The WORLD MOVIES channel and IMDB are my BFFs.

If I go for a walk along the beach, I will not be able to think of just the cool grains of sand under my feet. I will do that for a minute but soon I'll be thinking about what to cook for dinner, what Barnstormer's teacher said this morning, what HM said he had to do after school, the fact that I left the washing machine on soak cycle, the fact that I can't find that short black summery cardy in my wardrobe and so it goes on. Eventually, let's say 10 minutes, I'll remember to go back to just thinking about the grains of sand. Even with a relaxation app, these thoughts creep in.

Probably most telling of all is that even as I write this post, I am thinking about whether I should go shopping before or after school pick up while also devising ways to avoid participating in a round of Super Mario Brothers. I can't even be mindful of my MINDFULNESS post.

What chance of mindfulness do I have when my mind is FULL? My lovely psychiatrist just says PRACTISE, PRACTISE and PRACTISE every day. Train your brain to think of just one thing... your happy place. My happy place is a particular beach at Rottnest [below]. It is an absolute paradise and probably the happy place of thousands of people all around the world. You would think that I would be able to sit and focus on this stunning place for more than a minute.

The good news is that I can actually travel to this place IRL in less than an hour!

Anyone else having trouble with mindfullness? Got any tips?

Jane X X X