The Mindful Migraine

Mindfulness is a skill which involves being non-judgmentally present in your current moment. This might be an odd sidestep to traditional mindfulness matters, but if you regularly do your meditations or Yoga routines in your bedroom, or you spend a lot of time there due to chronic illness, you can become a bit hyper-aware of every aspect of your room to the point where you DO feel a bit judgmental. If you’re like me, your bedroom has been curated to within an inch of its life; it’s taken a while but it’s ‘just right’.  Just right, that is, until you start to feel a bit bored of the space around you.

If this sounds like you, then why not give your bedroom a free mini-makeover?

What you do is you go ‘home-shopping’ and look from ‘new’ items in your own home and garden.  Here’s some ideas:

+ Swap your artwork around.  I often move the painting that’s in one room into another, and then take that canvas from over there and bring it over here.  Just by moving an artwork into a new space, it suddenly appears like a new picture.  You notice it more.  Photos that might have been sitting on a sideboard that are almost ignored, take on a new life when they pop up next to your bed.

+ Do the same for nick-knacks.  Swap and mix and move.  Once you have an alternate picture in your room, color-match some of the features in the pictures to your nick-knacks. You can also find new uses for regular items, such as hanging necklaces off door handles.  Make a garland of paper flowers to hang over your bed.  Repurpose a few Christmas do-dads that aren’t too obviously Christmasy (like a golden bird or white angel wings) into pretty props. 

+ Bring the outdoors in with shells, seed-pods, twigs with interesting shapes, autumn leaves.  If you’re not allergic, pick a posy from your garden, and if you are, look for sprigs of leaves that can be placed in a vase. Make a collection on a bedside table to remind you that there’s a big wide world out there waiting for you to join in. 

+ ‘Browse’ your kitchen cupboards.  Look for fancy dishes that can hold your jewelry or makeup.  Find a bowl or wide teacup that can hold your outdoor treasures.  Cake platters and trays can also act as miniature display locations for some of the nick-knacks you’re moving around.

+ Borrow the cushions off the couch.  Don’t quite match?  Does it matter?  It might just create a new eclectic vibe that’s a bit more interesting than the same-same you’ve been living with for the last few months or years. 

+ Ask your kids for donations.  See what they offer up and then do your best to incorporate it into your new design.  Their token of love might not be what you were hoping for, but it will still be a token of love that reminds you of them every time you look at it.

+ Raid the memory banks. Lots of us have inherited small treasures from loved ones or have a box of postcards or letters from a relative’s travelling days. Prop an Airmail envelope on the sideboard beside a vintage camera and grandma’s brooch (the dated one you’ll never wear – but also never sell or give away) somewhere you can see them, as reminders that you are part of an eternal chain of ancestors whose interesting lives are part of what makes you who you are today.

+ Pile up the books. Perhaps you already have a bedside table of books – then stack them in a way that makes them a design-object. If you don’t read in bed, don’t worry, look for a book with an interesting cover that can be a form of artwork when set to one side. Magazines with interesting photographs are a great resource when you’re feeling too sick to read, but can get a bit unruly, so consider buying them a holder in a color that suits your room and make the storage item part of the decor.

+ Bring some of your clothes and textiles out of storage and repurpose them. Throw a favorite hat onto the corner of the bedhead. An old crib-rug could be used to wrap around your shoulders when you read at night. A beachy holiday sarong can act as a throw over the end of your bed. Perhaps your wedding high-heels have been hiding in a box to keep them pristine; why not put them somewhere you won’t trip on them, but somewhere they can add visual interest and spark good memories when you look at them.

Once you’ve set the room up with your home-shopping, see what stands out as a bit ‘wrong’, and consider a small investment. New pillowcases might be enough to revamp the colors in your room and act as a nice treat if you’re resting in bed a lot. Another moderate outlay would be a new bedside lamp that suits the new look but doesn’t cost a fortune (op-shops / thrift stores or charity outlets are a great place for new decor – just make sure anything electrical has been properly tested and tagged as safe to use.)

There’s no rules, and the nice thing about ‘home-shopping’ is that if you change your mind in a week’s time, you just put the pictures and cushions back to where they came from!

Take care taking care, and remember that ‘mindfulness’ can be as creative and adaptable as you want,

Linda x