Mental Health Awareness Week runs from the 18th - 24th May 2020, the theme for this year is kindness. Now, more than ever it’s important we show kindness to one other. Giving and receiving acts of kindness can help to improve mental wellbeing by creating positive feelings.
The Age of Isolation is a curious one. Forced to abide with strict guidelines, we exercise, socialise, travel, and shop with a combination of rigidity and uncertainty. Whilst each day, the news here in Wales and the UK, as much as internationally, reports on the various stresses and strains we're all going through.
Current home life can be a struggle. We feel cut off. Unable to go to our usual interactions with family, friends and work colleagues. For those of us who work, online meetings have become the norm. Many will likely struggle with this new found landscape. Equally, we might have a busy household going on, tasked with finding new ways of managing and entertaining family members stuck in the same space and time.
The last five weeks plus since Lockdown begun in the UK has been interesting for me. Faced with the current restrictions, my wife's working from home. Like many establishments, things in her workplace are uncertain. Self employed by the gig economy of the present day, I face a similar aversion. There's an uneasiness to this.
Since coming to the UK some years ago now, my wife and I have experienced a situation involving constant movement without time to form solid connections with others. Such isolation in one form doesn't make you bullet proof or immune to the effects of Lockdown though. Some days are easier than others.
A fresh view is therefore required in attempting to cope with the current uncertainty; A common
sense approach aimed at helping our own inner selves cope better. Something to help us look after others (as much as our own heart, mind, soul), whilst operating on a stronger ethos than feeling OK. Feeling OK isn't enough in times like these. Let's call this approach Kindfulness.
Kindfulness isn't a term I've come up with. It's a word coined by a wise, gentle Buddhist monk called Ajahn Brahm, based in Australia.
Kindfulness means finding ways of being kind to oneself, whilst practising awareness within one's own actions, reactions and surroundings, plus acting respectful, focussed, considerate, compassionate to others.
Kindfulness isn't a hard core meditation or yoga retreat going for days on end at home. Instead it involves simple objectives of practical kindness, courtesy, respect and self awareness, thereby making our own and others journey in Lockdown as much as life in general a little easier.
This might involve an online based chat, a standard phone call to reach someone we know. I do this a few times a week to various family and friends back home in Australia, plus here in the UK. It might feature shopping for a neighbour, a mate, a care worker busy with kids and ageing parents. Thanking key service personnel whenever they might serve us. Or being kind to ourselves in the current ebb and flow of domestic and work life.
This year “Kindness” will feature as the new theme for Mental Health Awareness Week 2020 from May 18th to 24th in response to the coronavirus outbreak. To quote Mark Rowland, Chief Executive of the Mental Health Foundation, “Now more than ever, we need to re-discover kindness in our daily lives.”
Kindfulness furthers this upcoming theme for Mental Health Awareness Week 2020.
It's a methodology and a practice useful to anyone, anywhere. At home, socially, or at work especially, kindfulness allows us to consider others as much as ourselves.
On the work front alone, it's isn't a trendy, new, check-in mechanism for employees and employers.
It's a stigma buster in times like what we're all going through.
