100 Days of Mindfulness - Presence

Book excerpt: It's time to live in the present! Simply stated, mindfulness is the practice of living in the present. It's choosing to focus on the here and now but without getting swept up in mental drama. Sounds easy enough, but it's actually really hard. Our brains are wired to think, think, think all the time. Whether we're thinking about something that happened a year ago or an hour ago, our thoughts take us away from focusing on right here, right now. Author Tracey Moore Lukkarila knows this from experience. As a sufferer of anxiety and clinical depression, she has spent a lifetime experimenting with different ways to manage her condition. Mindfulness has become the tool she uses every day to calm the internal chaos, creating space to breathe. Mindfulness is an excellent tool for depression, anxiety, and obsessive thinking. It's like a personal trainer for your brain, gently teaching you how to move past the negative mental ruminations that keep us stuck. With it, you can learn to quiet your mind and sharpen your focus. Tracey created this journal to share mindfulness techniques that work for her. Each day, you'll write down a few things to be grateful for, getting you into the practice of shifting focus away from judgment, negativity, worries, training your brain to focus more on the positive and to consider things you overlook and take for granted. You'll practice reframing negative thoughts to consider more positive, reasonable alternatives, and you'll pat yourself on the back for the things you do each day, big and small, to bring greater awareness to your impact in the world. Additionally, you'll be given specific, easy-to-do mindfulness exercises to quickly get yourself out of your head and into your life. You'll gain a greater connection to yourself, others, and the world around you.