Wake Me Up: Morning Positivity - Tips to Make Your Morning More Mindful [Guest Featuring Shaun from Mindfulness for Beginners]

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

This morning, I'm excited to welcome my friend Shaun from the Mindfulness for Beginners podcast. He'll be sharing some tips to make your mornings more mindful. I think you'll love it and find it helpful! Be sure to check out his show, Mindfulness for Beginners, featuring mindfulness guidance and practices. Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mindfulness-for-beginners/id1493806566 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1ozwIEgzEtHQezPoi83nVV?si=5d029d22a2354ad6 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey friend and welcome to Wake Me Up. I am so excited today because we're continuing the guest feature episode series on Wake Me Up. And today I've got my good friend Sean here. He's the host of Mindfulness for Beginners, a podcast that is laden with Nuggets of Knowledge. And this morning, Sean's got some very simple ideas about how you can make your mornings more mindful. Sean brings a really warm, lighthearted, and sometimes goofy attitude to mindfulness that I think makes it really relatable. and you'll see a bit of that aspect of his personality in this episode. So I really hope you enjoy it.

And if you do, definitely go check out his show. You'll find links for it in the episode notes. Now we'll have a quick word from our sponsors, and then I'll hand the mic over to Sean. Hello there, my friend. I hope you're happy, hope you're peaceful. I'm Sean, host of Mindfulness for Beginners Podcast, a show designed to make mindfulness easy and accessible

so you can live a calmer, happier life. Huge thanks to Tyler for inviting me on, wake me up. Morning is a great time to practice mindfulness. It sets the tone for the rest of the day. Your mind is fresh and less cluttered with distractions and hopefully the kids are still in bed. But we don't always get time to sit down in the old meditation cushion. That's why it's so important to bring your mindfulness practice and your morning routine together. If you think of the usual things that you do in the morning like eating breakfast, brushing your teeth and practice, seeing your Oscar acceptance speech in a shower,

most of the time we're in a hurry, trying to get everything done so you can start work or get the kids to school. We jump straight into a state of doing rather than a state of being, and this can set us up for a stressful day, rushing from one thing to another. Another way we can get off on the wrong foot

is by jumping ahead in our mind to the future. Think about when you're eating your breakfast, are you really enjoying it, or is your mind already in work worrying about the email from Janet? Taking a time to start the morning with mindfulness is one of the most powerful things that you can do for your well-being. And it's not just you that'll benefit. Your family and friends will see the difference too.

So how do we go about our morning routine mindfully? The first thing we need to do is to slow down. And to slow down, we need to give ourselves more time. Go to bed earlier, get up, Earlier, start work later. Give yourself the space to do everything at half your normal speed. I'm talking slow like a tortoise giving a PowerPoint presentation. Don't look at your phone, your laptop or the TV.

Make your morning screen free. Nothing is more important than your peace, your mental health. And you can find out if the Patriots scored a basket in the World Series of Sportsball later. Now that you've got the time and the space, You can really genuinely enjoy each part of your routine. For example, your breakfast. I have peanut butter on toast every day because that's the kind of person I am.

You can take a bite, put the toast down again and fully focus your awareness on the taste, the texture, the experience of eating it, feeling grateful for it, appreciating it, looking deeply into it and seeing how it will nourish your body, seeing the sun, the clouds, the earth, the labour and everything else it went into the food, because that's where life becomes wonderful when you feel joy and gratitude for the everyday things. And you can apply the same way of being to brushing your teeth. You can notice the feeling of the brush in your hand, the taste of the toothpaste, the feeling of cleaning each tooth.

As Ticknad hand would say, you don't brush your teeth to get it done and move on. You don't even brush your teeth so that you've got clean teeth. You brush your teeth simply for the joy of brushing your teeth. I'm going to demonstrate that right now with my electric toothbrush. The absolutely key thing here, Mounter, is that when you're back to some wind from it, it's a fertile clean rather than seeing out there and then the things are very important truth. And that's the most important thing.

the most important thing about mindfulness. I can't emphasise to you how important that thing I just said was. I'm just kidding around, but I do love to share the fundamentals of the practice. So join me, your old pal Sean, on the Mindfulness for Beginners podcast, available on all good podcasting platforms, many of the bad ones too. And each week I take you on a journey around an aspect of mindfulness and guide you in the practice. So I invite you to walk with me and discover how you can liberate yourself from anxiety and suffering. May be happy and peaceful, Slana will you?

And I'll see you soon.