My First Attempts in Mindfulness

What Have I Done?

Drawing I made with tutorial and over 50 minutes of work

     I have began this attempts to begin practicing mindfulness since May 23 of 2017, and I have been doing now for two days. Yesterday I tried drawing for 35 minutes (20 minutes in the afternoon and 15 before going to sleep) and meditating for 10 minutes. However, I have not found a lot of results from this methods to reduce stress together. I know that drawing did take my mind away from what I needed to do that day, and meditating did relax me. However, drawing did not relax me much because I got a little frustrated because I have lost some of my artistic abilities. The good part is that today, the 24th of May I revised some tutorials in the basics of drawing again before my mindful exercises and the 15 minutes I spent drawing were more relaxing and it was easier to focus in the task at hand.

My dog

     In the other hand, I have found meditating does help me relax a lot, especially if everyone in my house is completely quite while I do it. However, I have found out I can´t stay focused for more than 6 minutes, after that the last 4 minutes of mediation I began to drift to thoughts about homework and things I needed to do afterwards. However this did help me stay concentrated in that day´s reading of "The Catcher in the Rye" and correcting my humanities homework. 

     In the 24th, meaning today, I tried drawing again, with the tutorials, and as mentioned before it bore better results than last time. Also, today I decided to take my dog in a very long walk, with music from Vivaldi, to help me concentrate. I must say this method has helped me more than the previous two. Controlling my dog in a walk is hard and requires all that all my concentration is in the moment. However, this also relaxes me because my dog walks as if he owns the world and likes to play with strangers, so he makes me laugh a lot and forget everything else. 

     Even though it is early days still, I think that this project had began to help me relax somewhat. This can be seen because my parent´s say I no longer stay at edge all the time and take things a little more lightly.