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Today I’m going to talk about one of my favorite mindfulness exercises from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) called Leaves on a Stream. This is a really good tool to use in the moment when a panic attack is coming on or when your anxiety is escalating through the roof. I’ve also been using it these past days for trying to deal with my feelings of overwhelming sadness.
1. Find a quiet, peaceful place devoid of distractions (no kids! No dogs! No screaming bosses, no obligations…)
2. Close your eyes and take deep breaths. Or keep your eyes open (because perhaps you are somewhere you can’t close your eyes) but try to narrow your gaze so that you only see what is right in front of you, nothing else.
3. Visualize a stream. Think about what the stream looks like, sounds like, smells like. It could be a babbling brook with the birds twittering in tandem; a gurgling eddy that pools in between rocky rapids; a loping, lazy stream with dragonflies darting over the surface and a fish splashing noisily. Maybe a deer laps quietly nearby. Imagine you are right there and focus on the sensations of being near that stream.
4. Perhaps there is only one tree shedding its leaves; or maybe the stream winds through a thick deciduous forest. As thoughts/fears/worries/negative feelings come into your mind, imagine placing each one on a separate leaf that has fallen into the water. Then picture the thought and the leaf floating down the stream. Perhaps it just slowly floats away until you can’t see it anymore. Maybe it trickles through and gets wedged between rocks. Just make sure it eventually wrestles free to disappear like all the others. For me, I think of a waterfall and the leaf hurrying to the edge before it falls off out of sight, out of mind.
5. Do not judge the thoughts that come. Just accept that they are there. But realize you also have power to see them float away as leaves on a stream do.
This is really powerful and effective for me. I hope it helps you today too.
