What Is Mindful Awareness
Mindful awareness is a way of focusing on what’s going on at this exact moment. It means being completely here and now, and knowing what you’re thinking, feeling, and seeing around you. Mindful awareness teaches us to understand our thoughts and feelings without letting them overwhelm us.
It’s like watching clouds float in the sky without trying to grab onto them. We can notice our thoughts and feelings, but we don’t have to let them take charge of us.
There are four specific ways we can use mindful awareness to cope with gender dysphoria.
Types of Coping
Each mindful awareness strategy represents different ways of getting us more into the present. However not all strategies work for everyone. For example:
- Folks who have experienced certain kinds of trauma or panic like anxiety may find that the deep breathing exercise can be very triggering.
- Folks may also find that movement exercises can increase the gender dysphoria due to the movement of certain body parts.
We encourage you to look over the table above and determine which of the strategies you would like to try out. If you feel that any of the strategies could be potentially triggering, we recommend trying it out with some caution.
If you start to notice your anxiety spike during any of the exercises or start to become uncomfortable, quit the exercise and try one of the others. The point is to find which of the mindful awareness strategies work best for you and to use those.
If you know an exercise is not for you, just skip it and try the next one.
