Mirror. It’s Not Just A Reflection. It’s Your Reflection.

Mirror.

Our friend in happiness. Our friend in sorrow. Whether good times or bad, a mirror is almost always the first thing we meet at the start of our day.

So let me ask you, “When you see yourself in the mirror each day, what do you notice?”

Your hairs?

Skin?

Lips?

Have you tried looking inside your mind while looking into the Mirror?

A tough one. Ya, I know.

This is called “Mirror gazing” and is one of the most powerful self-awareness exercises. After all, the Mirror is not just a reflection. It’s your reflection.

Don’t be scared of the heaviness of this term — “Self-awareness”.

There is nothing monstrous about it. Knowing ourselves is a cakewalk instead. And “Mirror Gazing” is just one of those simple techniques which give you the benefits of self-awareness and mindfulness at the same time.

How to do it?

1. Stand in front of a mirror
2. Look into your eyes and your face
3. Try and concentrate only on these two areas
4. Notice the color of your eyes, look at your eye-brows, the iris. Notice the texture of your facial skin, the small holes, the scars, the facial hairs. Notice the area around your nose, around your lips. See how different you look when the intensity of your gaze changes
5. While you concentrate on these small details, your mind takes you on a journey. The journey will be insightful and will help you discover yourself in a new light
6. While you will be having fun in knowing something new about yourself, you will not realize that you were completely present in the present. There were hardly any thoughts that took you to the past or the future.

That’s mirror-gazing for you.

It’s a custom made experience

The Mirror Gazing exercise is as simple but it needs just a bit of initial courage to face yourself for these four to five minutes. Once you do that, believe me, you will enjoy this overall process.

Your mirror gaze experience is yours, this can not be compared with anyone else. Your mind journey will be yours, this is an absolutely personalized experience for our minds.

If you search for this term — “Mirror gaze”, you are going to see several references and benefits. People are following this exercise as meditation or a paranormal experience and there are different variants present.

When I did this exercise for the first time, I did not know any of this. The exercise just came to me. Just like that.

Don’t go into a fact-finding journey on Google. Keep it simple, spend just 2 to 3 minutes and that’s going to be enough to yield you the desired impact.

Though I am not an expert in the paranormal or meditation skills, my experience with the “Mirror gaze” is always plain and simple. Keep gazing and a new YOU will start appearing in front. It’s such a soothing experience to look at yourself in a way you have never done before.

Still, if you feel any discomfort, I would suggest you to immediately stop the exercise.

Personal advice based on my experience

1. Start with just a couple of minutes on day one.
2. You need not do this every day. Target to do this exercise three to four times a week.
3. Pick the time when you are alone so that no one interrupts the flow of your thoughts.
4. Gradually, add a minute to your exercise. Do it for three minutes in week two and then move to five minutes and so on.
5. Experiment with different sizes of mirrors.

The ultimate “Mirror Gaze” exercise will be the one where you will face yourself into a full-length mirror. You need to concentrate on each and every part of your body. I suggest, move to this stage only when you are absolutely comfortable and satisfied with the previous exercises.

A variant of my own

Through time, I have developed a unique variant of it for myself.

I have a beautiful small aquarium in my living room. It sits in a small corner with generally four fishes inside it.

As a variant of this exercise, instead of looking at myself in the mirror, I stare at this aquarium.

Watching these beautiful small wishes all around the aquarium, opening and closing their mouths, leaving small bubbles in the process, flapping their fins, touching each other playfully. A lot of times I feel they are talking to me, having a conversation.

What’s different in this variant is that while I see these fishes, there is a reflection of my face staring at me from the glass of the mirror. So in between my “Fish gazing” exercise, I experience these little moments of “Mirror gazing” also and that takes this exercise to another level.

Call to action

I encourage you to pick this simple exercise because this requires a very small time investment. In just a few days, you will start experiencing things about you that you have never experienced earlier. My advice would be not to judge yourself. Let these thoughts come and go. Treat them like emails. They are coming and going. Don’t try and open them. They are floods of information that are waiting to hit your mind and through this process, you will allow this channel to open up and let the inbox empty itself automatically.

Mirrors are a powerful tool for self-reflection. They are tools for generating compassion and love. As we spend more time alone and on our devices, we are missing out on this aspect of mirrors. Look at kids, they enjoy so much looking at themselves in the mirror. They learn about themselves each day. It’s like a social connection with yourself.

As adults, we don’t do that often.

“We are the mirror, as well as the face in it. We are tasting the taste of eternity this minute.

We are pain and what cures pain. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours. Soul of the world, no life, nor world remain, no beautiful women and men longing. Only this ancient love circling the holy black stone of nothing. Where the lover is the loved, the horizon and everything within it.”

— Rumi

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Nishith is a Chartered Accountant by profession. He is a Marathoner, an avid reader, aspiring author, philatelist, phillumenist and a transformation coach. He manages a unique self-transformation platform — “Be Better Bit-By-Bit”. This platform offers daily self-transformation activities and exercises to its members.

Philosophy and belief of this platform — “Small and Consistent Improvements”

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