Minding Your Mind: An Invitation to Deeper Attention

A Gentle Practice for Mental Health Awareness Month

Caring for the soil of our minds

Hey good people, and welcome. Just in case you have not been following along, I’m Aisha — a coach, therapist, storyteller, and founder of In-Balanse, where we hold space for personal growth, emotional clarity, and the sacred pause between who we have been and who we need to become.

Can you believe it is already May 1st, which means we have entered Mental Health Awareness Month.

And in efforts to draw awareness, I am choosing to offer a different kind of invitation for us in this week’s post. I am not here to offer any tips on how to hustle harder. Five quick ways to fix your life. Or another tool to help you check yet another thing off on your quest to wellness.

Rather, I want to offer support by simply launching a conversation on how we can begin to pay attention…a little more deeply, and a little more kindly.

Because here's the truth many of us forget…

“Mental health isn't just about what happens when things go wrong. It's about how we care for the soil of our minds every single day.”

So, this month, I invite you to take this journey, as I seek to step out to bridge this topic boldly by inviting more communities to the table to engage in healing conversations about Mental Health, across communities of color, faith communities, and cross generations.

So let’s get into it

There’s a struggle we don’t always name, a struggle within.

It’s not due to the challenges we face externally, but rather the battles happening with our minds.

—The relentless thoughts.

—The pressure to always do, fix, be everything to everybody

— Or live up to frequent expectations to achieve, or to prove our worth and value.

Without full awareness, we begin carrying this mostly unwanted but also reliable companion… Anxiety.

Although invisible, anxiety surely is impactful and a normal part of our day-to-day life. So much so, that we forget what peace, calm, and reassurance looks and feels like when it’s presented to us.

However, the reality is, we were never designed to live trapped by our mental noise or byproducts of a chaotic life due to our entrapment of our own mental noise.

The Overwhelmed Mind:

In 2003, I moved to Philadelphia, a city full of motion, ambition, and noise. Life moved fast, and without realizing it, so did I. Every day was a sprint: to work, to prove, to catch the bus, to catch a dream. Life became even more accelerated when children were added to the equation.

It wasn't 2016, when my family and I relocated to Michigan when I began to notice: My body, my mind, my soul had been conditioned to live in survival mode.

ALWAYS rushing, contemplating, and ALWAYS in a state of movement.

Everything in Michigan moved slower.

This was scary and I DID NOT LIKE IT.

The streets. The conversations. Even the buses, thankfully we had decided to invest in two vehicles once we moved here because not only would it have taken almost two miles just to reach the nearest bus stop, this mode of transportation would also require another hour of waiting just to catch a ride.

I hated it. I was uncomfortable. I was anxious. And restless.

But in that uncomfortable slowness, there was a hidden truth I wasn’t aware of at the time: I had been conditioned to constantly go….whether that was from living in California, or my time living in Philadelphia. I was now stressing and wrestling with the awkwardness of stillness within.

Question…Were we made for stillness?

Stillness is not just something we seek outside of ourselves naturally. As the saying goes, we live in a dog eat dog world. From a scientific perspective, I don’t think humanity would have survived if we sat down and watched things happening around us, because we would have been eaten. However from a biblical and spiritual lens… we were created to rest and be still within God’s presence. However our curiosity and need to figure things out on our own turns extinguished this opportunity for our lives.

But as we reach in the direction of how to better “mind our mind,” we need to recognize the importance stillness holds. We must learn how to cultivate inside of being.

This begins with minding our mind: noticing what we think, how we feel, and slowing down enough to reconnect with what matters most.

Why Minding Your Mind Matters

In a noisy world, it's easy to move through life on autopilot. Always reacting, always rushing, always bracing for the next thing. Therefore overtime, that mental noise adds up and builds, within our heads, hearts, bodies, and relationships.

Without paying attention to our inner world, we drift into patterns that quietly exhaust us:

Constant anxiety from unexamined fear.

Emotional numbness from always bracing for impact.

Mental clutter that keeps us stuck in overthinking and overreacting.

Chronic tension that eventually spills over into our relationships and bodies.

Living in a reactive mind is like living in a house full of noise…nothing feels restful, even when it’s supposed to. The good news? We don’t have to stay trapped there.

We can mind our mind and slowly reclaim peace from the inside out.

You are allowed to tend to your mind with the same care you would offer a friend in pain, or the same way you would see a doctor when your blood sugar was elevated; navigating those recurring headaches; or even addressing an intense toothache.

Minding your mind means noticing what’s happening inside and without judgment, and without rush. It’s about practicing a daily posture, so that you are able to start the process of aligning your mind, body, and spirit by listening curiously to what might be showing up on the inside, all while recognizing how this may be unleashing on the outside.

I want to invite you to begin developing ways to effectively show up for yourself. Moving out of a state of existing and leaning towards an active state of slowing down.

Minding your mind means:

• Pausing long enough to investigate what's fueling your reactions.

• Being curious about the pressure, fear, sadness, or anger that is raising within.

• Acknowledging your thoughts without letting them dictate your behavior.

Key questions to ask yourself:

• How are my thoughts connected to my feelings?

• How often do I react before noticing what’s truly underneath?

• How can I notice what’s happening inside me without rushing to fix it?

Words to Remember

• Just because something feels urgent doesn't mean it needs an immediate reaction.

• Calm is not a personality trait; it's a cultivated skill.

• Nothing is too hard to begin healing, even if it feels impossible today.

Call to Action As We Draw Awareness to Mental Health

• Share this post with someone to begin a dialogue around Mental Health.

• Please “Like/ Heart” This Post

• Join me in the community on May 22, 2025, as the BE-Lab hosts a healing workshop centered bringing this topic to life in the community.

#MentalHealthAwarenessMonth #MindingYourMind #Mindfulness #StillnessPractice #SelfCompassion #EmotionalWellness #GentleHealing