Mindfulness means paying attention to what you are thinking and observing your patterns of thought. For instance, you might realize that you have a tendency to feel that people don’t care what you think and that your opinions are unimportant. Recognizing that you have these thoughts and catching them before they start causing you anxiety, can help you piece together the important parts of your identity. When you start paying attention to your thought processes and patterns you’ll need to practice attentive non-judgment. This means being aware of your thought patterns and acknowledging them, but not beating yourself up over them. Everyone has negative thought patterns and processes. By paying attention to them, you can eliminate them from your mind.
For example, look at things like religion, nationality, sexual identity and see if those are ways you define yourself. Look at the roles you take on, such as your job, your position in your family (mother, father, sister, brother), your romantic status (single, couple, etc. ).
Talking to and working with a clinical psychologist can greatly help in uncovering patterns of thinking and being. They can also help you deal with the more negative aspects of your thinking.
Don’t limit yourself in negative ways. Definition of the self determines the action. So, for instance, if you’re defining yourself as someone who has bad romantic relationships, you’ve already lost the potential for a good romantic relationship. It is a story that you tell yourself, and then because you believe the story, you will already be behaving in ways that make the story true.
You won’t lose your self-identity if you base it on values you hold at your core, like compassion, courage, integrity. Write down a list of these values and consciously and mindfully act them out in your daily life. Therefore, if courage is one of your core values, stand up for someone being harassed at the bus stop, or if honesty is a core value, fess up to having lost your father’s favorite watch. If compassion is on that list, spend time volunteering at a homeless shelter.
This means don’t let outside circumstances rule your identity. That comes from within in, from the core values that you have already identified as being important to your identity. Understand that the negative experiences in your life have offered knowledge. For example, if you have had negative experiences with romance, learn from those experiences. What have they taught you about the kind of person you want to be?
