Breathe to know you are alive
© 2018 Maria Hunt. All rights reserved.
Daily Discipline
Just One Thing
As psychologist, Rick Hanson, likes to say, “You can use your mind to change your brain to benefit your mind.”  He suggests we practice one small thing a day to transform our brain to enhance our well-BEING. Ideal “small things” are the ones that appear naturally during our day, or are relatively easy to accomplish.  All you need is …
Mindful mowing
This practice was written by David Deitch, one of my colleagues at Avila University.  We could call it “mindful sweeping” or “mindful cooking” or “mindful flossing” because it occurs whenever we build mindfulness into our daily routine. It is an ideal exercise to conduct when we find ourselves scrambling to get something done. Think of this as an …
Take a picture
“Something attended to appears to change even as one attends to it.†Father of American Psychology, William James Ever think about what it means to “be attentiveâ€?  Do we:  (1) hold the object of our attention still in our mind or (2) do we vary how we focus? Harvard psychologist, Ellen Langer, studied K-12 students’ attention and found that most young …
Just This
 “A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” Killingsworth, M.A., & Gilbert, D.T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330, 932. Would you believe that the average person’s mind strays from the here-and-now experience a whopping 46.9% of an average day… even when doing something enjoyable?! …
Count your blessings
It appears that the way people perceive the world is much more important to happiness than objective circumstances. – Psychologist Ed Diener, Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth There are numerous benefits that we derive from cultivation of a “gratitude attitude.” Among them are increased optimism, energy to spare, stronger connections to other people, and better at …
The mustard seed
Our brain is wired to focus on negative events and experiences… and our brain becomes more sensitive to these negative events and experiences with practice! We notice negative events and experiences effortlessly. We perceive negative events and experiences vividly. We recall negative events and experiences readily. Because negative events narrow our brain’s ability to gain …
1-minute blessing
Sometimes life brings us difficulties or misfortunes that result in an experience of pain. Let’s take a moment to pause, close our eyes, and visualize offering courage and support to all people who are in pain of any kind. This is a prayer or blessing adapted from psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s book, Love 2.0: May we …
Using time
One of my favorite stories is about the about the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther. As the story goes, Luther had a spiritual practice of praying an hour a day. One day he said, “I have so much to do today that I have no choice but to spend two hours in prayer.†As many times …
Mindfulness of sensations
Our brain responds to three types of attentional cues in our life: It notices what we need for our survival. It notices what appeals to our interests… or demands our attention. It notices what we choose to notice. Most of the time, we function in the second category. We automatically absorb and respond to “demands …