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There was a time…

 

There was a time

There was a time…

When I had plenty of time – day in and day out. I started to draw and paint to live the creative part of me. I started to do Yoga to move my body and still my mind.

I had time to go to get my nails done, to sit in a café and just watch people walking by while slowly drinking a huge latte macchiato, I had regular hairdresser appointments and lots of time for shopping.  I spent lots of time on writing and even more on reading, reading real paper books.

This time has gone!

I have no time at all, this is a feeling that implanted itself into my brain.

I need to rush through my life because everything is planned and organized and if I get off this schedule tragedies will happen.

I rush to the Kindergarten to be in time before they start their day, I rush back to work, I squeeze appointments in between my work schedule as I cannot attend them with my son. I rush to the Kindergarten to pick him up and run with him through the supermarket because he’s tired and cranky. I rush back home and hope he sleeps so that I can finish my work and prepare dinner, when he wakes up there’s no possibility that I sit on my desk as he will go mad.

We need to play (which is his right!) and that’s the first time where I can slow down a bit. After dinner he’s fully awake and energized to enjoy a long evening with us which means not really time for me to do something creative or watch a movie without interruption, a bit of Yoga works as he starts to like that. It’s late when the day ends and sleeping without me is still rarely happening and instead of reading a few “pages” on my e-book I check emails in bed and hope he’s sleeping deeply soon so that I can take a shower before my eyes close because I’m so tired.

Is this the life I imagined with a child? No. Is this how life just is as a working mum? No.

I think I had to go through this to realize something…

No tragedies happen if I’m off the schedule!

Surely work needs to be done and there will always be days like this BUT it’s up to me to change the majority of days to a more relaxed and flexible schedule.

The more relaxed I am, the more relaxed my son is.

We listen to music in the morning while getting ready to leave the house and we snuggle a while, that’s MORE important than sitting five minutes earlier in my office.

These moments won’t come back!

My office day is scheduled, there’s no way to be completely relaxed there as we have timelines and things need to be done in time but that’s just a matter of prioritizing my work and have proper to-do-lists. If I work highly concentrated instead of being distracted by stressed thoughts about what comes next I work in a more efficient way and yes, more de-stressed. If I need to finish something in the evening anyway why not to drive to the supermarket before I pick my son up? This way I’m faster and my son can go home from the kindergarten right away and snuggle up for a good sleep. I prepare dinner, I work, I am finished when he wakes up and we can do some great things together – we can finish cooking on days I didn’t manage to and he loves the kitchen, or we play or we go to the playground for a while, or we bath him, or or or.

I may not have the time still to work on my paintings, to write lots, to read lots, but I find time to enjoy, I find time to look at a caterpillar as if I discovered something completely new because my son shows me how to do that.

We go outside and search the whole sky until we find a plane or the moon or even both. We start to walk and stop again because there’s a cat climbing up a tree and we follow her to see where she goes.  My little love is not even two years old.

He learned a ton of things in his life already and he is ruling our day!

I am his mother and it’s my task to be at his site, to carry him when he’s tired, to feed him when he’s hungry, to show him this world and to go on my knees to face him on his level.

It’s my life as his mother and I love to do all of this because he should be the happiest child on this planet.

I’m able to write (as you can see), it isn’t as regularly as it once was but does that matter? I’m able to do things just for myself, they are limited and not much but that’s OK. I’m able to draw once in a while, I’m able to do many things I used to do but is that really important right now? No, it isn’t.

Important right now is that we live in this very moment because these days pass by like crazy. My little baby is a toddler already and he soon will be doing things on his own and doesn’t want me to help him or to play with him. I don’t want to miss these days and look back one day to regret that I wasn’t crawling on the floor, checking what is under the table or under the couch, just because it makes him laugh in such a giggling wonderful way. I will have plenty of time in the future for all the other things but right now every minute spent with this little bunch of pure happiness is all I need.

There was is a time…it’s called NOW!

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Daily Mindfulness is so easy

Daily Mindfulness is so easy

Daily Mindfulness

Seriously, we often forget how easily we can have small time-outs because we are too stressed to realize.

Life is not that complicated, we make it complicated.

Are you showering? What question is that you may ask now.

Did you ever try to shut down your thoughts while being in the shower and started to be aware of the moment?

Raise your awareness instead of thinking about what to do next. Listen to the sound of the water, smell the soap, really smell it. Watch the water and follow it’s path, one drop against the tile, it’s slowly running down and ends up in the puddle your’re standing in. Realize how your hair becomes softer when it’s getting wet, see the chicken pox on your arm when you turn the water off. This shower experiences is like a little spa visit for free. You will feel better afterwards than before if you give yourself these little brain time-outs.

Another daily mindfulness idea is going for a walk. You don’t have to walk an hour if you don’t like walking because it’s not really about the walking itself, it’s more about the whole experience. You step outside and actively feel and see and smell where you are.

What sound does it make when you walk, are your shoes making a sound or the surface you are walking on and how does it change when you step on another surface from tar to grass for instance. What are you doing with your arms, are they swinging, are you walking with your hands in your pockets? Is your breathing different? Listen to your breath, try to calm it down while you are walking and inhale deeply, how does it feel?

Do you see the little birds along the way or the trees which are loosing all leaves right now? There are so many little things we don’t see when we daily rush by and it’s beautiful to realize them one after the other.

So, and for how long were you walking now, because the best thing is that you start to loose track of time and all of a sudden you were walking much longer than anticipated. These are the precious moment which energize you and give you the power to go through the really stressful times for example at work.

I have lots of other examples but will end up with giving you my favorite third one.

Lay down – yeah, that’s a great one, isn’t it?

If you read my blog for a while you know that I love Yoga and when I say “lay down” I mean laying down in a yoga way.

One wonderful asana (yoga pose) to relax is Supta Baddha Konasana or the reclined bound angle:

images

Actually my aim was to show you a picture of me in one of my favorite relaxing positions but try to make some yoga pictures when your toddler in running around you.

The result was the following:

© by misssfaith2017 (10)

That’s life with children and it’s so worth it!

You’ll find millions of pictures on the web but this moment will last a lifetime.

Back to the relaxation pose – besides this reclined bound angle there are several other Yoga poses which are not complicated at all but give you instantly a time out and also time to focus on something completely different.

Child’s Pose is one, it relieves back pain and when you lay your forehead on the floor you will have new sensations I assume you never did since a while – did you smell the floor? I like our wooden floor as it has a wonderful smell which I only can realize when I am like that on the floor.. Outside in the grass is great as well, when the grass is tickling your nose and you close your eyes and just feel the earth below you.

If it comes to relaxing yoga poses I could go ahead for a while I assume, but the essence is that you do what feels good for you and that you just start to open your mind to what surrounds you at that very moment.

It’s indeed much easier than we think as life is not that complicated, it’s all about feeling, tasting, smelling, being, living – mindful moments are present every second of our life, we just have to raise our awareness to appreciate them instead of rushing through our life as if we are hunted. We aren’t, we are here to live this life we have.

What are your mindful moments? What do you like to do to feel yourself again?

I would be happy to know your thoughts.

Take care!