Mindfulness

Bonjour madame

For this post, I want to tell you about my newfound take on prayers (salah).

Ever since I was a kid, I was taught about the concept of khusyu' which I generally understood it as being fully focused on the prayer. I often thought that to achieve such state, one has to be pious to really get the benefits of praying. With this mindset, I find myself hopeless whenever it comes time for prayers. Hopeless because I would think that it is such a huge task for me to be positioning myself to attain the state of being truly khusyu'. Which eventually lead me to just braze through the motion because I know that it is so far of reach for me to attain the state of khusyu'.

But now, I'm having a new take on khusyu' and on prayers itself. I view salah as a mental exercise for my brain. I redefined the meaning of khusyu' as not to be to give full focus on prayers. But, to tell myself that it's okay to let your mind wonder around at times but just be aware of that's happening so that I will stop from wandering around and to return to the initial focus during the salah. Setting a focus point is crucial in this mental exercise and my go-to focus point would be the correctness of my pronunciation of the surah being recite. As long as I focus on the pronunciation, I feel like it is a good enough mental exercise for me to maintain the focus. And this whole exercise is so that I will be more aware of what's going through my mind; Being mindful. Being in-control. 

Your life is mostly on auto-pilot. When you've been doing the same over and over again, your minds are already accustomed to it and you just go through life without even noticing it. When things are going unintentionally, things all around you gets ignored and you'll never really appreciate the things that are happening at present. 

So here's my new take on mindfulness. I feel a slight increase in contentment right now just because I get to get my mind thinking. And the "thinking" is nothing heavy like solving problems or coming up with new ideas. It's just a mere awareness of where my mind is going and I have the power to steer it. It comes especially handy when my thoughts are going to the negative side. When that happens, by being in the state of mindfulness, I get to take a breather, consult myself about the consequences, and then move on to a, hopefully, brighter frame of mind.

Lets try and do it too! Just take 1 minute of your day everyday to focus on one thing and one thing only. Start with focusing on your breathing. Just sit and focus on your inhales and exhales for 1 whole minute without thinking about anything else. If a thought pops out, it's okay. Don't just immediately shove it away. Instead, you absorb the thought, realize that you're thinking about something else, put it aside for later, and then continue to focus on your breathing. Once you get this done, eventually this habit will trickle down into your everyday train of thoughts. Before you know it, the gap between your stimulus and response grow wider. And soon, your response tends to be the more empowering one.

Goodluck friend.