ACTualized Living w/ Erik

All right, we are live here this afternoon, this beautiful Friday afternoon. I'm up here in Minnesota, and so we got some nice 60 degree weather going on, which is encouraging before the winter cold season comes. It's nice to touch base with you all again here this week on my second live stream. Before we jump into anything here today, I just want to put something on your radar. I've got a video coming out this week that's really going to set the tone, the pace for both these live streams as well as the future prerecorded content that's going to be on my page.

The title of that video is going to be transforming wellness and rethinking the norm. And what I hope to approach in that video is just open your mind to how we've engaged our thought process around what wellness is and what it means to be well and so more to come on that. But just in this live stream today, who's ever with me, or maybe you're watching this after I've gone live, is hopefully a really practical tool and a tool of mindfulness. And if you're like me, you've heard the word mindfulness thrown around a million different ways.

And one of my goals here as a mental health professional is to also bring some education and relevance as to why these tools are so often talked about in this space. Mindfulness is awesome because one of the amazing capacities, capacities of our mind is to be able to think multiple steps ahead. This tool of our mind can do a really, really good job of predicting, putting together these equations, seeing kind of what we anticipate the future to be. Unfortunately, that tool is not so helpful in our day to day lives of being grounded, being connected, and finding a sense of peace and resilience in our circumstances as we are today.

And so we use mindfulness to help bring us back to this present moment, to just kind of exist here for a minute and observe rather than be chasing after the math equations our mind likes to kind of get us in tune with. And so today I want to offer you a very, a very simple mindfulness activity that I find really effective. And in this mindfulness activity, we're just going to observe. And more importantly, we're going to observe our body as it relates to just kind of where we're at right now. Now.

And so if you can, I'll encourage you to get to a comfortable place and if reasonable, close your eyes here with me and maybe take a deep breath in and maybe another. Now, the goal of this time is not to be any certain place or avoid any certain thought or emotion or feeling, but just observe. And as we're here, I'm going to encourage you to, without opening your eyes, observe your environment. What do you hear? What do you smell? What do you taste? What do you feel? Now imagine that as you do this, maybe you've had a busy day or a hectic week, and so just thoughts or feelings are constantly coming up and taking your attention away.

And that's okay. We don't have to fight it, but let's just look at it and then come back to this place of what's a sensory thing in our environment we can really put our attention on. For me, I have a sound of the light bulb above me. It's got a unique ring to it. And so what I want you to do is just identify one source of stimuli in your environment. I want you to really focus on that thing. Does it have a texture to it? The sound, the smell, the feeling? What really grabs your attention about this thing your attention has wandered into?

Is this something that you've noticed before? Is this a new sensation for you? For me, the sound of the light bulb is something that I've heard before. But uniquely, when I take a minute to really focus my attention on it, I start to notice things I usually don't pick up on. Thoughts come up of like, am I maintaining this live well enough? Are people engaged? Am I right? Or maybe, ooh, what am I doing after this? And that's okay. I'm sure you have similar thoughts, but we can just let them go without holding tightly onto them.

Bring our attention back to the light bulb or whatever your light bulb is in your environment. We're going to take another couple deep breaths in here and slowly come back to this place. How does mindfulness relate to actualized change in our life? What it does is it takes us out of these places of imagination, non reality, and connects us back to what is real, this present moment, and from there, creating some space between where our mind wants to take us and where we actually are. We can move a little bit more slowly without being in a rush to get somewhere or feel something, maybe build some appreciation, gratitude for where we are, and then maybe follow that mindful present place with action.

Maybe we forgot that, man, five minutes out in the sun today would really make a. Make a difference for me, man. I forget that how much I appreciate something about my environment. Maybe I just made some cookies or whatever sensory thing maybe you picked up on, and now we can come back to that place and not be so connected to things that aren't here. And that's the footsteps towards change. That's the footsteps towards contentment. It's great to see you all. And just as a reminder, I do have that pre recorded video coming on later this week that's going to give us an entryway into rediscovering what our relationship is to the idea, the thought, the word, the concept of wellness.

I look, look forward to seeing you there and in the next live video next Friday. Take care. It's good to see you all.