2015 Word of the Year

2015 Word of the Year-Mindfulness

What is mindfulness (or being mindful)?  Well, Wikipedia defines it as "the intentional, accepting and non-judgmental focus of one's attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment",^[1] which can be trained by meditational practices^[1]

The Greater Good defines it as

Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment.

Mindfulness also involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them—without believing, for instance, that there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to think or feel in a given moment. When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts tune into what we’re sensing in the present moment rather than rehashing the past or imagining the future.

In 2014, I read 10% Happier by Dan Harris.  It was a very thought provoking book.  He talks about his past in not being mindful and then after he started meditating and becoming more mindful. 

I feel mindfulness is being present In. The. Moment.  That may include meditating, but more just doing one thing at a time.  Granted, sometimes we need to multitask, but sometimes I feel I am doing too many things at one time and nothing really gets accomplished.  Not being mindful makes me crabby, makes me want to hide from everything and makes me a less productive person. 

So my 2015 word of the year is: Mindfulness.  My goals will reflect this.  How to divide my time between work, home, hobbies and family.  And coordinate time to sleep in all of that. 

My goals:

Work-be present with each patient.  Figure out how to coordinate addressing multiple patients (my own, triage calls, other provider’s patients, labs, letters, etc).

Home- keep the house picked up and clean, fix things that need to be taken care of, and get rid of things we don’t use or need.

Hobbies-I have so many, but I’m narrowing it down to two.  Running and reading.  Both allow me private time to be mindful and enrich my mind. 

Family- Be present for them.  I often multitask and leave them out.  I feel like I’m catching up on Facebook or Pinterest or some other web page.  And I need to be focused on them. 

One of my goals is to address my word of the year each month in a blog post and how I am accomplishing this goal.