If there is one thing that can help you overcome challenges, slow down the busyness, calm the chaos, and help you find fulfillment in motherhood it’s mindfulness practices for moms.
Mindfulness will change your life from the inside out like nothing else.
It’s what I help my clients with inside Mom On Purpose Membership, my mindfulness community for moms, and it’s what has had the biggest impact on my life.
That’s why today I’m sharing 11 mindfulness for moms tools to help you get just a little bit ahead in your day-to-day life.
11 Mindfulness For Moms Practices That Actually Work
The list below includes the top mindfulness practices for moms that actually work, given the full lives that most moms have.
1. Practice self compassion with your hand on your heart.
Whenever you’re feeling a negative emotion, like irritation, frustration, or anger, place your hand on your heart, take a deep breath and tell yourself, “it’s okay, I got you.”
When you feel a big feeling, it can be tempting to react outward, but the key to feeling the feeling is actually going inward. This is a moment for you to have compassion for yourself, instead of taking out your emotion on someone else.
2. Identify your feelings with a one-word label.
You’ll get so much more control over your feelings just by naming each feeling, as you experience them.
It sounds like, “this is anxiety. I feel it in my body.” Just a simple acknowledgment that the feeling you’re experiencing is within you.
3. Find the location of what you’re feeling in your body.
Once you’ve named the emotion (labeling it), find the location of it in your body and describe it.
Is it in your jaw, your neck, or your stomach? What does it feel like? Is it tight, hard, tingly?
The better you get at describing your feelings the better you’ll get at processing them, which is important for the rest of your life.
4. Separate actions, emotions, thoughts, and facts.
A simple and effective way to overcome challenges is to separate out the actions, emotions, thoughts, and facts of what happened.
What did you do? What were you feeling? What were you thinking? What are the facts?
Here’s an example:
- I yelled at my three year old.
- I was feeling angry.
- I was thinking, “she isn’t listening to me and she should be.”
- The facts are that she wasn’t getting on her shoes after I had asked.
The reason this exercise is so powerful is that it shows you where you have the most power—in your own thoughts, feelings, and actions. You can’t control the facts. You can’t always get your little one to listen. But you can decide on purpose how you want to show up. Awareness is the first step.
This is what we do inside Mom On Purpose Membership, my coaching program for moms.
5. Choose empowering thoughts.
While you can’t control what other people do or say, you can control your response. And your response (your actions) are determined by your thoughts.
You can choose more empowering thoughts to create a more supportive mindset. The key is that you don’t just choose any affirmation you hear about. It has to be a thought that feels good to you.
Come up with a list of five or so thoughts that create feelings of confidence and empowerment, and practice them.
Here are a few examples of empowering thoughts:
- I was made for this.
- I can do hard things.
- This season isn’t what I expected, and yet, I’m learning a lot of lessons.
6. Ground yourself with your senses.
If you find that you have a lot of mental chatter and are often stuck “in your head” try going for a short walk and focusing on your senses, rotating each sense every 30 seconds or so. First your smell, then the temperature on your skin, then what you see, etc.
Grounding with senses is a powerful way to keep you in the present moment.
7. Have an empowered mindset.
The way I teach having an empowered mindset is through five components:
- Taking emotional responsibility.
- Focusing on what you can control.
- Accepting reality, without resistance.
- Focusing on solutions, not problems.
- Being fueled by positive emotions, like confidence.
When you do all five of these steps, you’ll find yourself much more empowered. So, the next time you’re facing a challenge (big or small), run through this list of five to see if you can make any shifts to empower you.
8. Journal daily about who you want to be as a mom.
Instead of journaling about your day or your challenges, journal about who you want to be, in the future. (In Mom On Purpose Membership, there’s a Mindful Journaling course that teaches you how to do just that.)
This is the most powerful way of journaling because it helps you attach to the future you want to create, instead of what you’ve done in the past. You can create an intentional identity so that you become the mom you want to be.
For example, instead of feeling like you experience a lot of mom guilt or are just an “angry mom” this method of journaling helps you create your new identity on purpose, such as “I’m a mom with many roles, none of which I feel guilty about” and “I’m a mom who has emotions, including anger, and I’m working on processing that.”
9. Choose your feelings on purpose.
Most people think that their feelings are created by what’s happening in their life. But that isn’t true. Feelings are created by your thinking. What you think creates what you feel. So, if you want to feel different (more supportive emotions), you just need to get in the habit of feeling those new emotions on purpose.
The best way to do this is to create thoughts that generate the feeling you want to experience. Then practice that thought over and over. Memorize it, and the way it makes you feel. The more you do this, the more you’ll rehearse new feelings.
10. Make confident decisions, quickly.
Indecision is a dream stealer. Instead of making progress, and failing forward, you end up spinning, busying, and not making progress. Not to mention you end up exhausted. To create the future you want most, practice doing the opposite. Practice making decisions quickly.
Most people don’t make fast decisions because they don’t have their own back when they get it wrong. But you can actually have your own back no matter what—mistakes and all. There’s no upside to beating yourself up.
11. Join Mom On Purpose Membership, my coaching program for moms.
Better than any blog post, is a real space for you to go to and get your specific questions and concerns answered. This is what I offer inside Mom On Purpose Membership, my coaching program for moms.
With my foundational inner work framework and mindful journaling practices, you’ll get access to tools and resources that will help you navigate the challenges of motherhood from the inside out.
You’ll increase your confidence, create a more empowered mindset, feel more calm (and less overwhelm), and have more clarity about who you want to be in your future.
A Final Note
Motherhood can be challenging for many reasons, so much of which is out of your control. That’s why having mindfulness practices for moms can be the difference between “surviving” motherhood and “thriving” in motherhood. Yes, there will always be challenging moments but those moments don’t have to turn into days or seasons. You have so much more power to create the life you want, without anything in your circumstances changing, simply by becoming more mindful. Best news ever.
