I would like to start the new year with an article about our negative scenarios. I mean these scenarios that our mind brings up and instead to help us preparing for a possible situation, they provoke the opposite result, blocking us from experiencing and learning something new.
I identified until now 4 kind of negative scenarios that, when they have power over us, reduce our ability to feel our bodies. They occupy our attention telling us a story about ourselves that is more connected with the past than with our present. They make harder for us to be aware of ourselves because they create tensions in the body and breath restriction. And they are an attempt to avoid uncertainties and fears. By being more aware of how they manifest, we acquire more options to recognise and stop them. So let go through a basic description of how these four scenarios may appear.

• The first scenario is “doubting about my abilities”
  Feeling insecure or afraid – of something new or something you experienced in the past as negative- provokes often the reactions of wanting to avoid the situation triggering such sensations. We may find ourselves looking for any kind of reasons to avoid the present situation. We may become very creative with finding excuses, giving us reasons to skip it.
  For example, it can happen that tasks that we normally dismiss as not important take suddenly such an importance that we feel they are the real priority so to avoid the situation where we feel insecure.
• The second scenario is “everybody else is better than me”
  Fear and insecurities invite the brain to compare ourselves with others in order to evaluate our skills. But this is not always practical: there are situations where comparing with others do not provide any valid information, specially when the situation is new. Also our differences make any comparisons with others irrelevant. But it can be a self-sabotaging mechanism: by considering ourselves inferior to someone else we get a „good“ reason to avoid the situation.
• The third scenario is “I am better than someone else”
  This scenario may look more favorable and, in some situations, it may be. We may succeed when other don’t, or being better according with some standards in sports, in working-projects, in gaining money, in social skills. But then, why being better then others should be an objective, occupying our energy in comparisons? The need to automatically be better may reveal a fragility in the self-esteem, the need to compensate a lack experienced in the past, or a form of control favoring what one can quantify.
• Scenario number four is “making mistakes”
  This refers to our reactions when we do “mistakes”: can we stay calm and take responsibility for what we did? Or we find ourselves panicking or, on the opposite side, pretending that it doesn’t concern us, that we don’t care?

Surely, other scenarios can occupying our attention. Whatever yours is, you can pay attention to the fact that when they play in your mind, your ability of paying attention diminishes as your presence in the now.
Your body gets more tensed, your breath shallow, your level of energy may rise but often not in a sustainable way.

My recommendation, in order to shift your attention from the scenario played in your mind to the situations happening in the present moment, is to engage in an activity mobilising your body and focusing your attention on the physical sensations you will then perceive. And for that, breathing more consciously is always a way to reconnect with your body.

Picture taken in Val Mustair