7 Day Mindfulness Meditation Challenge

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to the course, your seven day meditation challenge. The idea of this course is to actually get you practicing meditation every day. As I've said in previous courses, mindfulness meditation is the single best practice that as just to anyone, if they wanted to improve their life, either reduce the suffering or just put themselves in a way that they can start pursuing their goals. Go from a place of surviving to passionately thriving. Obviously, we want to balance ourselves and make sure that we're doing the exercise, eating well, seeing the doctors, doing the therapy, taking the medication, socializing, all of that good stuff. But in my mind, marvelous meditation is the core practice. What I want to do with this course is basically take you through seven days of practice. You can idea is you're checking to this course once every day for seven days. By the end of the course, you'll have got the basis to start a meditation practice. The beginnings of habit formation. We'll go into what meditation is, how to meditate, and how to form that habit in a way that will sustain yourself ongoing that by the end of the seven days you will be off and running and maintain that practice. My name is Zachary Phillips. I'm an online mental health advocate, author and coach. In this role, I've helped thousands of people move from a place of surviving, passionately thriving. One of the main ways that I get people to start processing, start working through things, start taking positive action, is through mindfulness meditation. I hope for this course to be able to help you do the same thing. Let's give it a try. 2. What Is Mindfulness Meditation?: Mindfulness meditation is the state of awareness that arises from purposely paying non judgmental attention to the present moment. So a bit complex, but basically that means that we're being in the present moment right now. Now I've got a couple of a bunch of courses up on how to mindfully meditate. I encourage you to take a look there to go into the nitty gritty of the practice, but we're going to cover it in a basic level here just to get you up to speed. As a bit of a reminder, the way you practice mindful meditation on a basic level and introductory level is to just draw your attention, draw your focus to the breath entering and leaving the nose. You might sit down in a dedicated meditation space, might be walking, or you might be just wherever you like you go. Okay, I'm going to draw my attention to the breath at the nose. Your mind wanders, you acknowledge it. You gently bring your focus back to the breath entering and leaving the nose. Thoughts pop up, emotions, feelings, memories. Some mental phenomena occurs. And this could be positive or negative. You look at it, you acknowledge it. And then you gently return your focus back to the breath. You just repeat this process of returning your focus back to the breath. Focusing on the sensations entering and leaving the nose for the duration of the session. A session can be any amount of time. It could be the duration of one breath. It could be 10 minutes, could be an hour, could be a day, whatever your duration is. And we'll talk about that a little bit later on. But the point is that's what you do. You sit down. I'm going to meditate and draw my attention back to the breath. Why this helps you is that basically by focusing on the sensations entering and leaving the nose, you're getting into the present moment. These sensations are happening right now. The thoughts and ruminations that you're lost in, the memories of the past, the future, planning, all of these things that are happening, pulling you away from what's happening right now. The more you can draw your attention back to the present moment, the more you can practice that skill set, the calmer you will be. The better decisions you'll make, the better relationships you'll have. Because your actions and your words will be more in line with who and what you truly are. You won't be acting on impulse. You won't be acting on fear or anxiety, or ruminations. You'll be here in the present moment. The idea of practicing mindfulness meditation to benefit your life is that you will establish a daily practice. You might start in the morning, you might do it at night, you might do it sometime during the day. But the idea is that every day you practice mindfulness meditation, you start developing those processes. Let's have a look at how to get a habit formation going. 3. Habit Formation: The best way to establish a habit, good or bad, is to do it daily. Okay? Because we're considering how to implement a positive practice, one of the best ways is to type to a routine. In my experience, both with myself and with teaching other people, is a morning routine is the best time. Now, it's the only time we'll talk about other options. But I like a morning routine because you can get up and do a few things, then that's your morning routine done. You don't have to think, this is just what you do in the morning. For me, my morning routine is I wake up, I get myself ready, you know, toiletries and brushing your teeth, all that stuff. Have a coffee, and then I sit down and do mindfulness meditation. I do 10 minutes guided via an app, and I do 10 minutes of silent, mindful meditation. Then I do my exercise in the gym. Then I have a showering, get myself ready for the day. I do that every morning without fail. The idea being is that I know that that primes me for the rest of the day. I've meditated, I've exercised, I'm clean all of those things. Even if I do nothing else in the day, that's a win, particularly if you're having a bad mental health day. But in general, those things make the rest of my day good. Beyond that, I know that I'm just going to do them. Having a ritual instilled in the morning, a morning routine takes away issues of motivation. I might not be motivated to meditate, or exercise, or shower. I might not have this desire to do it and get after it. But I know that that's what I'm going to do. I get up and I do these things that taking away the decision enables me to guarantee that I'm going to do it. If you're going to rely on motivation to get you to do something very quickly, you'll find that the motivation wanes and you'll stop. If you have motivation to do something, use that motivation to instill a, to instill a daily practice. Now, your mornings will look different to my mornings. And I've got some courses on establishing good habits and breaking bad habits. I encourage you to check them out for more in depth onness. Your morning will look different to my morning. You might have different family structures, You might have different work times, whatever it is. But where at all possible, take a step back and think about how can I instill meditation into my mornings, to have this ritual, to be able to do it every day? Like I said, I do 20 minutes total. That's just what my life at the moment allows. Life got more complex. If something happened that took away some of that time, maybe I'll have to readjust. If life got less complex, I can add more time into the practice, but the key point is that I'm doing something every day. When you're establishing a morning routine. Start small. If we're talking meditation, start with 1 minute. Just 1 minute day. That's what we're going to be doing in this course, is just 1 minute of mindfulness meditation together every day. But if you can add a bit more, but I do warn you on the back end of that. Don't go too fast too soon. Some people start meditating, they're like, right, I'm going to do an hour every day. You might, chances are you don't have an hour to spare. Chances are that you'll be able to push away other stuff for maybe a week, but then all of those other tasks will jump back in. I found that the best way is to simply start and then slowly add to the time. Okay, I found the balance of 20 minutes, other people do 45 minutes, other people do 1 minute. Just do something every day. Some other options, if mornings just don't work for you, for whatever reason, we'll be similarly using those same skills to do a bedtime routine, do certain stuff before bed. If you know your beds at a certain time, you'll meditate before that. Okay, that can work. Just be aware that around that bedtime thing you might start falling asleep. Our goal with mindfulness meditation is to check into the present moment. It's not to assist us with falling asleep. That's a different form of meditation, different form of practice. That's like a relaxation. Okay, Which is great, but that's not our goal. Just be aware that you might need to tweak it if you find yourself getting really sleepy and falling asleep from the practice. If you find that it's helping you to fall asleep, but you might want to also do an additional meditation earlier on in the day and then use something else or something similar to help you to sleep. Okay, Because the benefits from mindfulness don't come if it puts us to sleep. Putting us to sleep is great, but it's not the ideal goal. Work out a way that works for you. Maybe just after dinner or just before dinner, or if it works for you just before bed. However you find, again, that works for your routine. Some other people find that due to young kids or whatever circumstances, the only time they can do it is in their lunch break at work, or in the car before or after work, or on the train on the way to work, whatever it is. Take a little step back, take a breath and think. When could I fit in 1 minute, right? Just 1 minute of practice. And I'm sure no matter how busy you are, you've got 1 minute. You can take it from TV or social media time, I guarantee you. Yeah. Wherever it is for you, figure out a time and place that suits your meditation practice. 4. Mental State & Location: Before we get into the daily meditations, I want to just establish the idea of establishing an internal and external context. Where are you going to meditate? If you can have a dedicated space, this might just be literally a cushion just in the corner of a room. Some people have a whole dedicated meditation space. You don't need to go that complex. But basically if you go, okay, I'm going to use this cushion or this corner, or this area as my meditation place. It can prime you to meditate. It's like the idea being that if you always go one place to exercise, you get into that groove. If you always go one place to dance, that's your dancing place, right? The idea is that you can establish and use those external cues to get you into the groove. It's not necessary. You can meditate wherever and whenever you like. It is also, on the other hand, important to practice of multiple locations to get a look at your mind in different areas. The point I'm driving at is if you have a place, a dedicated meditation space, great, use it. If not, that's completely fine. The other thing I want to consider is the internal context. Rather than just bouncing around between things and going, all right, going to meditate. That can work. But a better way is to start priming yourself, thinking to yourself, okay, I'm about to do my meditation. Get yourself into that groove. I'm going to do this thing to benefit my mental state, to help myself with the relationships, to calm myself down, to focus on the present moment, to learn how to be here. Now, just before you meditate, just start priming yourself going. Okay, I'm about to do my meditation practice with this process of having a dedicated meditation meditation place, if possible, and starting to prime yourself before you meditate. Both of those together will help boost your mindfulness. Once again, they're not necessary, but they can certainly help and can certainly help particularly when you're developing a new habit. 5. Class Project: We're going to talk about the class project and the next seven videos. The next seven videos are going to be a muffles meditation that we're going to do together. There'll be a little talk, then we'll meditate together for 1 minute. The idea is that you'll do one of these meditations each day for seven days, ideally in the same place, at the same time, We're trying to establish a habit here. Now of course, the idea of this course will be for you to keep that practice going with 1 minute, with as many minutes as you like. You can come back to eat any specific day and use that over and over again if you like. But what I want to encourage you to do, or the idea or the goal of this, is to start establishing that practice. Get you meditating for seven days in a row and then allowing you to take that with you and continue. I'm going to be using a kitchen timer for 1 minute time to help us. Now, I strongly suggest you get yourself one, there are a couple bucks of ebay. I prefer it to a phone timer, mainly because phone is attempting, the beef goes off and you're like, oh, you're back on social and you're not mindful anymore. This doesn't have that issue. In terms of the class project, all I want you to do is just basically a mindfulness meditation journal. Day one, this is how I felt. These are the issues upload the next day, reply to that. Day two, this is how it went. These are any issues. 34567, What we're doing here is keeping each other accountable. If you post in that seven days, you know, and I know that you're meditating, it's a way to establish that habit, okay? It's very easy to go. I'll do it another day, I'll put it off. But if you commit to this post, even if you just write, say day one went well, no comments. You don't have to say anything. I just want to have this engagement back and forth to know that, to help you to establish the practice with a bit of accountability. If you're struggling with something, if you're not sure about something, if you need a bit more clarification, the class project is a great way to do it. Like I said, the next seven videos are going to be just brief talk, 1 minute and do the meditation. And then just very quickly upload the class project and say, day one did this, felt this way. Any issues? I'll put a little bit in the class project section summarizing this with a little example. But like I said, let's start establishing that meditation practice showing. 6. Day One: Okay, so welcome to day one of the seven day mindfulness meditations. In a moment, I'm going to start the timer and you're going to close your eyes and draw your attention to the sensation of the breath entering and leaving the nose. If your mind wanders, that's okay. Acknowledge it and gently return the focus back to the breath at the nose. Let's begin. All right, great work. Now, note down in the class project section how you went and then tomorrow. Let's do day two. 7. Day Two: Welcome to day two of your mindfulness practice. Just like yesterday, we're going to draw our attention to the breath at the nose. If our mind wanders, we're just going to gently bring it back. But we're going to add something today. If you find that it's hard to focus, try counting the breaths on the in breath. You're just thinking to yourself, 11111, the outbreath. 11111, The idea is that, that focus on that number will help you to maintain a little bit more focused attention to the breath. Now in the minute, you're unlikely to get beyond ten, but if you're using this skill set in a longer form practice just get to ten and then start back at one again. Because we don't want to get lost in the ego of getting a big number, Okay, So if you find your mind wandering, try counting. With that in mind, let's close your eyes and begin. All right, great work. Just head over to the class project section. No down how you went and then tomorrow we'll do day three. 8. Day Three: Okay, welcome to day three. Just like the previous days, we're going to be drawing our attention to the sensations of the breath entering and leaving the nose. Like I mentioned yesterday, counting is a great tool to help you to stay focused. But another tool is labeling. The basic idea is that something pops up, a mental phenomena and you just label it. You label it a memory, a thought, an emotion, a feeling, a physical sensation. Nothing more detailed than that. And if you don't know what it is, you could label it a cloud, as in a cloud of unknown sensations. The idea is something draws your attention away you go. Uh, memory. When you return your focus back to the breath, something draws your attention away, Uh, feeling drew your attention back to the breath. With that in mind, disclose I was and begin. Okay, great work. Just track down how you went in the class project section and tomorrow we'll do the next day. 9. Day Four: Walking to day four of the mindfulness meditation practice. We talked about using labeling and using counting as a way to help our distracted mind, as a way to become more mindful and refocus our attention back to the breath. But there's a couple of other things we can do if we find ourselves struggling. All that we might want to try as a different form of practice. We use the breath because it's always there and always available. But really any object and any sense can be the focus of our mindful attention. Today and tomorrow, we're going to use some different senses. What our mindful focus today is going to be is on what we can hear. Okay? We're just going to take a slow, calm breath and then let ourselves hear whatever we hear. Ideally, we don't make judgments. We might hear the traffic or nature or people talking. But we just want to observe and hear it for what it is, not. Add the additional labels onto it. Let's give it a try. Close your eyes and turn your attention to what you can hear. Okay, great work. Just put into the project section, how you went, and then tomorrow I'll see you for day five. 10. Day Five: Hello and welcome to day five of your fuss meditation practice. Yesterday, we used hearing as the point of our meditation focus, but now we're going to use the sensations coming from our feet. This one is a great one to be used as a formal meditation, for example, while you're walking. But can be done anywhere. And at any time, it's a great grounding exercise, both literally and figuratively. Because if you're focusing on the sensations coming from your feet, you're no longer out in your mind, you're in the present moment. In a moment, you'll close your eyes, enjoy your attention to the sensations coming from your feet. Let's begin. Okay, great work. So once again, just put down in the project section how you went. And I take this moment to remind you that any of these minutes can be extended if you want to keep going, by all means keep going. Yeah. So I'll see you tomorrow for day six. 11. Day Six: To day six of your mindfulness meditation practice this day. For this minute, we're going to need a small object. I've put in my hand a little riverstone. But it could be a key. It could be a pen. It could be anything that can hold in the palm of your hand. We're going to practice our mindful attention on the physical sensations coming to us in a moment. You need to pause the video and grab an item. Just anything. It doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be anything significant. You're going to hold it in your hand, you going to play with it and feel it with your eyes closed, and you're just feeling it to see how heavy it is, what it feels like. Are there any sort of bumps? Is it sharp? Is it soft? Is it smooth? Just focus on the physical sensation of the object in your hand. Yeah, crab that object and let's give it a try. Okay, great work. So once again, head over the project section. No doubt how you went, and I'll see you tomorrow for the final day. 12. Day Seven: Welcome to day seven of your mindfulness meditation practice. Today we're going to be returning our focus back to the breath. We're going to use the sensations of the breath entering and leaving the nose. I want to remind you of the tools of labeling and counting. Also of the ability to use any object, internal or external, any sense, as your focus of mindful attention. We're going to use the breath this time, but by all means, feel free to use any object you like. If your mind wanders, acknowledge it. Gently return the focus back to the breath. Let's close our eyes and begin. All right, great job. Once again, Chuck, how you went down in the class project section. Remember that the whole goal of this course is to get you mindfully meditating every day if you want to go back over these seven days and use them each day if you like. But ideally, you're just doing it on your own. But like I said, feel free to choose any of these days or go through all of the days again to continue to establish that practice. If you've gone through the seven days and you want to keep engaging with the class project to extend it out to two weeks or a month or whatever you feel like, By all means, keep going. We'll keep responding and we'll keep each other accountable. 13. Quick Recap: Just a quick recap. In summary here, remember mindfulness meditation is the state that arises from purposely paying non judgmental attention to the present moment. That basically means we're getting out of our head and into the moment we're get away from the anxiety and the rumination and the depression in the memories and focusing on what's happening right now. This is beneficial because it will help us to make better choices. To say better words, to take better actions. By better, I mean more in line with who and what we truly are. Not just at the whim of those random thoughts that pop up to establish a practice, to establish a habit, we want to practice every day. I suggest that what works for me and what works for a lot of people is to establish a morning routine. Meditate for the same amount of time, the same way every day, at the same time. Now for me that works in the morning, I prefer that might be at night, might be in the middle of the day. Find a time and place that works for you. I suggest you start small with the amount of meditation time that you do. 1 minute is enough. I'm up to about 20 minutes a day. And like I said, I vary it depending on my life. If something takes away some of that time, I'll have to reduce it if I'm allowed to have more time, if life opens up, I'll add more time. Okay. A couple of little things I strongly suggest. Like I said, a kitchen timer. Use a kitchen timer rather than a phone as your time. Just because phones are a bit distracting. A bit tempting. Yeah. The days that we did and the class project are designed to keep accountable to get that habit in practice. And like I said, you can go back and review those days as many times as you'd like. And you can keep adding to the class project beyond that seven days if you like. I want to highlight where I got a lot of the material from this. From its from my book, Mindfulness Guidebook to the Present Moment. Click the link below. You'll be able to read a bunch of the chapters online. They're all going to be released for free over time. Idea being is that I value mindfulness meditation as such a positive influence on my life and on those around me. That I want the information to be out there for free. It's just click through and there's some guided meditations. It's all up there. No hassle. It's out as a paperback, ebook and audio book if you want to own it. All right now in the one spot. But over time will be out there for free it over and check it out. But like I said, establish that practice. Get the meditation going. Just 1 minute a day is enough. Thanks for watching is.