Putting Mindfulness All Together
For You to Know
It takes a lot of practice to find your balance of facts and feelings. You can never practice mindfulness too much. Just like riding a bike, the more you practice mindfulness, the easier it becomes to find your balance.
Now that you have learned a little about what mindfulness is, let’s talk about different ways you can practice being mindful. You can practice being mindful for bits of time every day. You don’t need to have this workbook with you to practice.
Here are some ways you can practice being mindful:
- Pay attention to your breathing. While doing this for a few minutes, notice if a thought, feeling, or sound catches your attention and say to yourself, That is a thought (or feeling or sound), then turn your focus back to just breathing. This is an important activity you can practice many times every day.
- Review activity 4. What facts can you see around you? Those are your rocks in the jar. How do you feel about the facts? Your feelings about the facts become the sand filling up the space around the rocks in your jar. The jar is your mind, full of facts and feelings.
- Think about what you need to do and what you want to do. Let’s say that after school you need to get your homework done but you want to watch a movie. Is there a way to do your homework and still watch some of the movie? This can be tricky to practice, but just because something is tricky doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Find a way to balance what you need to do and what you want to do.A DBT-Based Skills Workbook to Help Children Manage Mood Swings, Control Angry Outbursts, and Get Along with Others