Mindfulness: How to Connect with Yourself and to Others with Ashton August

Self-care doesn't just involve sitting around doing nothing. Listening to one's own thoughts, absorbing, and analyzing all that occurred during the day are all parts of spending time with yourself. In a day with 24 hours, we spend about 15 of them awake after deducting the hours we sleep. How much of it are we spending with ourselves? And what value do we place on ourselves? In this week's episode, YouAligned Founder and Content Director Ashton August delves us into mindfulness; taking charge of your mental health and well-being. YouAligned is a resource to promote wellness of the mind, body, and spirit. Their mission is to provide insightful, motivating, and unique content on a wide range of topics such as wellness, spirituality, yoga philosophy, and more. Listen to this podcast and develop a more positive mindset so you can truly thrive. --- Listen to the podcast here: Mindfulness: How to Connect with Yourself and to Others with Ashton August Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about connection because it’s ironic that, in the modern world, we have the most devices, the most means in which to connect, yet we’ve created a system where it is harder to connect with people, connect with others as well as connect with ourselves than it seems like it’s ever been before. My guest today, Ashton August, her business, YouAligned, helps you connect with yourself so you can better connect with others and it incorporates so many aspects of what we all need to do in this particular period of time to have a better image of ourselves and a better connection with who we are and become better aligned with what we want our lives to be. --- Ashton, welcome to the program. Hello, thank you so much for having me, Stephen. I’ve been looking forward to our conversation today. I always love connecting people with this health and wellness sector because it is such an important focus right now, especially because I believe we are in a mental health crisis society wide right now and that we need any of these tools that we can get in order to just become better connected and better accepting of ourselves. Well said and I am in full agreement with you. As a mental wellness advocate, I cannot emphasize enough how important our self-care as a means for supporting our mental health is and, you said it, unfortunately, it’s so true that, I agree, we are in a state of mental health crisis. So, currently, right now, and we’re recording at the end of 2022, beginning of Sagittarius season, which we’ll probably get into later, me being a Sagittarius myself, but currently at the end of 2022, what is the main thing keeping people from being mentally well, being aligned with themselves? I think that we are still rubbing up against the problem that we’ve had as a society for quite some time, which is this glorification of the hustle mentality. So even though we’re getting more and more aware of this being the state that we’re in and this perhaps being not optimal for our health, we are not really seeing a collective change yet. So I love that the awareness is there, like people like us are having these conversations and are dedicated to making this change, but I would say that at the end of 2022, society as a whole is still really stuck in “Go, go, go, do, do, do, get as much done,” and you and I both know that when we’re in the state of mind, I’m sure all of you tuning in know, when we are frenzied like that, it’s very, very hard to take a step back, take a deep breath, get present, and find that space for ourselves. For sure, and one of the challenges that I’ve personally encountered is this feeling of guilt, this feeling of I should be doing something. What do you think is the antidote to that? Because there’s going to be a day when you’re just off, that’s part of the cycle of life, you’re just not feeling it today, whatever you’re supposed to be working on and maybe it’s a day you were meant to rest or do some form of self-care, as you advocate in your business. I love that you bring up this question because it really is rooted in self compassion and I also can fully speak from experience as being a very type A individual, which I know so many of us are, where we hold ourselves to these high standards, and you know what, that’s okay, but it’s not okay when we then shame ourselves, guilt ourselves with the, “Oh, I should, I ought to, I needed to,” and it’s really just bring us deeper into this cycle of self-loathing, the lack of self-love and self-care, and so the antidote to that is to practice self compassion, which is really rooted in mindfulness. And mindfulness is simply defined as a full present moment awareness of things as they are without judgment.”Share on X “Without judgment” being the important word, right? Being the important word because we all have those days where we get everything on our list done and more, awesome, that’s not the day to day reality and, in fact, you and I both know, most often than not, something’s going to come up and change it. And that’s okay, that’s life, we’re gonna get back on the bandwagon tomorrow, but for today, please notice when you’re bumping up against the shame, the guilt, and try to just take a step back and replace that with self compassion. “You know what, I wasn’t able to get to it today, I’m not gonna beat myself up over it. I’ll choose to be kind to myself.” And we just reset the script. We reset the script. And sometimes our self-care can be as basic as that self compassion. That counts. In that hustle culture mentality where one of the things that sometimes has frustrated me at past jobs is this daily stand up and the daily stand up to me has always made me think of, okay, well, if I didn’t get anything done today, I have nothing to say today and everyone’s going to be judging me. Do you think that there’s an aspect of the external environment that people need to control for or that the main key is that self compassion and if you have enough self compassion, no matter what comes to you externally, whether it be a boss, whether it be a family member, or anyone else saying, “You should have gotten this done today, you should have gotten that done today,” you’ll be able to withstand it and just simply state, “Hey, I had an off day and that’s okay”? Yeah, you just said it. We in life cannot always control our outside external factors and environment. What we do always have control over is the way that we choose to respond and notice I did not say the way that we impulsively react. When we choose instead a response, that’s also rooted in the mindfulness of taking a step back and realizing, “Okay, you know what, my boss might have some negative feedback for me today,” some other stressful factor might come in and influence my day to day but when we keep that one-step removal between us and those outside factors, we’re able to just take that step back and say, “Okay, there are things that are outside of my control but let’s get back to what I can control,” and this is my internal response. And I would like to also take that one step further and invite everyone to invite in this concept of the Jedi mindset. So the Jedi mindset is it’s a little self-explanatory. You hear it and you’re like, “Yes, I want this.” If you’ve seen Star Wars, for sure, yeah. Exactly. But also, I’ve actually been doing this work with my therapist, and my therapist is the one who’s like, “Ashton, we’ve gotta employ the Jedi mindset,” and this kicks in strongly when, you named all the triggering factors, boss, coworkers, family, holiday times, any of those heightened stress situations, these are opportunities to practice the Jedi mindset and the basis of the Jedi mindset is recognizing that every single experience and every single situation we’re in is simply an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to, in this case, practice our Jedi mindset. And some of the key nuances of a Jedi: mindfulness, presence, compassion, empathy, control, calm. When we’re coming from all of these places, whether it’s towards ourselves or projecting outward, doesn’t that feel like a nice, grounded empowered place to be as opposed to being left to the whims of whatever is thrown at us, which, hey, we’ve all been there too, but if you’ve got the choice between which you would like, being at the whim of the external factors or facing everything with the Jedi mindset, I’m thinking let’s go with the Jedi mindset, shall we? For sure, and what is something that someone can do right now, say someone’s listening and they’re struggling with whether you call it the Jedi mindset or just any of the words underneath it being truly present, being compassionate, being compassionate to themselves, someone can do right now to start getting better at it? It starts with the breath. And, yes, I am a 12-year-plus yoga instructor, but whether your background is yoga, meditation, mindfulness, or any form of mindset or coaching, it always starts with the breath, because we’ve all heard it, before you react, take five deep breaths, count to ten, whatever it is, but let’s all try that. Wherever you are, whether you’re driving, whether you’re seated, whatever you’re doing, just try to sit nice and tall or stand nice and tall, if your feet are touching the ground, feel them nice and firmly planted and we’re going to do three breaths together. So a deep inhale through your nose…and a nice gentle sigh. Good, nice deep breath in through your nose…nice, gentle sigh. One more time. So just take a moment to notice any shifts and it could be massive, it could be very minor, but when we take a moment to connect to the breath, it feels good but we’re also activating the parasympathetic nervous system,...