Micro-Mindfulness: Slowing Down in Small Moments

I'd like to offer you a moment of tranquility during your busy day. I invite you to imagine the ocean. There are places along the coast where the waves crash upon the shore, sometimes turbulently and dramatically. If you dive deeper under the water, there’s a whole world of life that includes creatures living peacefully even while the chaos persists on the surface. Many of us get caught up in the turbulence of our day-to-day lives and we avoid carving out room for peace because we believe to do so requires major overhauls and big changes. Instead, I propose seeking micro-mindfulness: crawling inside small moments that have big impact.

There are many sources of overwhelm—family, job, relationships, finances, the state of the world, and while we honor the stress and intensity they cause, we can learn to compartmentalize instead of feeling fully all of the time. Peace and balance aren't something we can achieve. We have been fed a story by the dominant capitalistic culture of white supremacy that being productive is the only way to be valuable. This ignores the reality that peacefulness is continuously created and cultivated with intentionality, not a goal to be checked off a list.

If you’re anything like me, mindfulness practice ranges from feeling accessible and smooth to difficult and frustrating. It is called a practice for a reason—we’re made to feel that we must meditate for hours or force our minds to stand still in order to be “successful” at it (ahem: culture of productivity). Instead, I believe it is a slow development of skills that take time, presence and awareness—accessing our bodies' capacity for slowness over the course of micro-moments. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy teaches us that we go slower to get deeper. What I notice about the times that mindfulness feels difficult for me is that I’m asking too much of myself. This is where micro-mindfulness can help gain deeper access to the well of calm within.

According to Pedram Shojai, a former Taoist monk, the West has gotten the concept of meditation wrong. He suggests that mindfulness is simply about gaining awareness of how you use your time. Modern society promotes busyness, so it’s up to you to focus on small moments to slow down and create peace for yourself.

“Time is the currency of life, so any way you can hack your day to become more aware of how you spend time can improve your relationship with it.”
— Pedram Shojai

This looks different for every person. For some, it might be taking a couple of moments to listen to a song with intentionality, closing your eyes as you let the sound wash over you. For others, it might mean being in a crowded subway car and focusing on nothing more than your breath. Even during a moment when you’re worried about a million things, I invite you to protect your energy by bringing your awareness back to your body and breathing deeply, focusing on a point of tension inside and softening it with each exhale.

Reminder: It’s perfectly acceptable for wherever you are to be the limit of your capacity at that moment, and still I ask you to explore what gets in the way of finding a micro-moment to leave the chaos?