Mindfulness, Fe-SiO, and Your Worries ...
by Jomel Bajar, PT,DPT,MS
In the world of mental health there is a well-known term in anxiety and stress called “storytelling”. One of Fe-SiO’s goals is to help prevent you from storytelling by teaching you how to create a mindfulness practice.
You see, “storytelling” is the opposite of mindfulness practice.
What is storytelling?
In technical terms, it’s the act of telling yourself an unrealistic story and spiraling into anxiety because of it. We do it all the time.
Mindfulness practice through Fe-SiO combats this “anxiety spiral” by teaching you to calm your mind and avoid telling yourself an unrealistic story, and instead taking a “wait and see” approach.
Here’s an example: Toddlers are great at “storytelling” when they get hurt. They fall and scrape their knee, it bleeds a tiny bit, but it will be just fine. You and I might hug them, empathize with them, even give them a band aid, but we know they’ll be okay.
Instead of knowing the pain and resulting scrape will eventually go away, they start getting upset about what they don’t know. They’re bleeding. It hurts. They become afraid of worst-case scenarios and this leads to toddler tantrums and panic.
“Where is my band-aid? I fell down, it hurts, and I need a band-aid,” they cry.
As an adult, you have an awareness of what happens next. You know that if you scrape your knee it’s going to sting. You know you won’t like it.
You’ll gripe for a second, “awe man, that hurts,” but you recognize that the hurt is temporary. It goes away. And so, you might take a deep breath and hold it, but you wait for the feeling to pass and then stand up with an “I’m okay” and move forward with your life, only barely focusing on the small scrape after the fact.
You don’t tell yourself a story about how your leg could fall off (I hope! And if you do then
Fe-SiO is perfect for you!). When you do this, you’re calming your mind.
You’re being present in the pain and letting yourself get through the temporary discomfort. Mindfulness practice is exactly this.
It’s knowing that your feelings exist and will pass. It’s sitting back and feeling your feelings (both pleasant and unpleasant) and allowing them, but not telling yourself a negative story about how badly it’s going to end.
But storytelling isn’t only a toddler trait, adults do it too. We worry about how when we told our friend we couldn’t make it to their party, we might have caused a rift in our friendship. Or we worry that we’ll never get back on our feet after a negative event.
Calming your mind, relaxing, experiencing, and allowing those feelings without interacting with them is a proven technique to help calm anxiety.
You simply experience Fe-SiO. It’s a mindfulness practice to learn how to let go of mental noises in conjunction with body stretching to loosen soft tissue tightness.
It was developed so you can walk in and not worry or think about how to practice mindfulness, and is an invaluable tool to help you lean to rest your worries.
We can’t wait for you to experience Fe-SiO.
Good Read:
Three Simple Mindfulness Practices You Can Use Every Day