Meditation and mindfulness are not the same things and although you can indeed learn one without learning the other, I personally believe that you miss out on how well they shake hands together. Learning how to go inside your mind and build that headspace only gets easier if you are making the time to allow yourself to do that outside of mindfulness exercises and trying to learn things in practice. Think about it this way, learning mindfulness all by itself is like training on a hockey team by only playing games.

Let’s use meditation as an example of practice, a space where you can be by yourself, get comfortable with your thoughts and inner voice and start to build a headspace within yourself to gain that distance when it becomes game day.

If you don’t have a meditation practice already in place, we have a great course to help you out with that. If you do have one in place make sure that the intention that you’re setting for each meditation is geared towards mindfulness. If you’re setting intentions for healing or for guidance all of those things are wonderful but if you want to stack the deck in your favor when it comes to mindfulness, don’t forget to refocus your intentions as well.

If you are doing this with a self-paced meditation, try this framework.

First, start your meditation with calming yourself down and entering into a medium level meditation. Once you are comfortable and settled within your body and mind, imagine a room that is filled with many people. The important thing in the beginning to structure when entering into this room is that people can only speak while you are looking at them. Each person within this room represents different thoughts within your mind. Training yourself to go from one thought to another and intentionally moving your focus from one to another is a wonderful starting point. As you get good at this then add in background noise and then maybe a few others talking in the background, until finally you are entering a bustling room with everyone having full on conversions much like walking into a packed room in real life. Using your focus to train in on one thought at a time to bring clarity until you release and move to the next.

Remember meditation is the workout for the brain. It’s training the gray matter the same way we would go to a gym to train our physical muscles. It takes time to develop a certain muscle group. At the gym you start with the lower weight group and higher repetitions, moving the weight up slowly and eventually you’re lifting up more weight than you could in the beginning. When it comes to your gray matter, meditation is no different. You start small and slow, and you build up the repetitions until finally you can lift much more mental weight than you could when you begin. Eventually you should be meditating at least once a day somewhere between 20 minutes and 1 hour but in the beginning to build the habit, work it into your schedule where you find it to be comfortable.