Is a Mindfulness Meditation Practice on Your New Year’s List?

The December-to-January holidays sweep – along with busy schedules, multiple social commitments, and richer fare than usual – also always brings a sense of promise.

As we take stock of the past year and look forward to the next, the possibilities can seem endless for becoming the best, healthiest, happiest, and most authentic person we can be.

And there never seems to be a shortage of new plant-based healthy living books or plant-based cookbooks to fan the flames of our motivation.

This is good because we can never get too much support for our worthwhile endeavors.

Yet if you aren’t already engaging in one, have you considered a mindfulness meditation practice as being that which will make a big difference for you in the new year?

Minding the Mental Gap

Often overlooked is this one element that can mean the difference between roaring success or what can seem like flaming failure of our new self-improvement projects. That is the development of mindfulness.

Mindfulness is the part of our thinking that can be strengthened to help us find our way  through what can often seem like wild fluctuations of thought.

Thought patterns that can keep us constantly vacillating between this, that, or the other thing – such as when it comes to our commitment to better eating and active living.

Thought patterns that can keep us stuck in the past – our old, perhaps unproductive way of doing things.

The Inner Plant-Based Journey

Since the release of The Plant-Based Journey, I have received lots of emails from readers excited about Journey, happy to have the recipe templates, easy meal planner, personal vignettes and case studies, and thrilled about the inclusive nature and step-by-step scaffold of the book.

Many times these notes will include an enthusiastic reference and gratitude for the inclusion of the Mastery of Mindset chapter and element.

For example, the letter I recently received from a reader in Seattle, Laura.

Why Am I Still Overeating?

Laura had written to me to express her excitement about how she has finally seen a pathway to move out of habits of dietary self-sabotage and embrace something new with the steps in The Plant-Based Journey – particularly pointing out how valuable to her have been the lessons of Chapter 13 – “Mastery of MIndset”.

 More Juice for Your Inner Journey

Yet sometimes the emails I receive say something about “hoping to finally get it together” with their plant-based plan.

To which I respond, “Did you read Chapter 13 in Journey, “Mastering Strength of Mind?”

On more than one occasion the answer has been “I skimmed it” or “I plan to get back to it” – missing entirely that the mindfulness aspect of making change is, for many of us, the linchpin in the entire affair of transition to plant-based living.

Yes, we need the basics of what’s on our plate, what’s not, and how to plantify our fare.

Yet for those of us who still struggle even when given the “Here’s the problem, here’s the solution, now just do it”, it’s a little more involved than that.

That’s where mindfulness practice comes in.

We invite a whole new level of embracing new guidelines of eating and healthy living when we start to pay attention to our attention.

The Mind Aware Podcast

As if perfectly timed for the launch into a new year, I was contacted by Dana Wilde, creator of The Mind Aware program, to be on her podcast.

Dana’s programming archives feature mindfulness conversations with many luminaries, including Jack Canfield. Listen in on our conversation about this often overlooked missing link – the mindfulness connection.

Give Yourself the Gift of a Mindfulness Meditation Practice

No matter how long an unhealthy habit or old tape has been running, it is never too late to shift it.

A shift in perspective you can have by practicing mindfulness can create change in previously unimagined ways.

While you will hear lots more from me about it as we move forward together on this journey, you there are several resources for mindfulness right here on the juice for the journey blog. Perhaps previously overlooked, here is a simple way to start a mindfulness practice today.

Happy to be on this journey with you!