Originally published in elpais.com/verne
Can you count from 1 to 10 without your mind wandering? We’ll explain what mindfulness is and why you should practice it.
We begin with a fable. Once upon a time, in a faraway land, a queen walked barefoot and hurt her foot with a sharp stone. Filled with rage, the queen ordered her entire kingdom to be covered in leather. However, just as her subjects were about to begin the task, a wise minister intervened and suggested a simpler formula: instead of covering the entire kingdom, why not protect the soles of our feet with leather? And this is the origin of shoes.
“It seems like an absurd idea to cover an entire kingdom in leather to protect our feet, but in everyday life we often do the same thing,” writes meditation teacher Gil Frondsal in his book Living in the Present (PDF translation into Spanish). It’s impossible for everything to fall just the way we want it, and sometimes (too often!) it seems like the exact opposite is happening—that everything is against us. In those moments, it’s essential to put on those shoes because the world, no matter how we feel, won’t magically transform itself to our liking.
Mindfulness, often defined as the ability to pay attention to the present moment deliberately and nonjudgmentally, acts as protection. But while shoes can only protect us from the outside world, mindfulness—a cornerstone of Buddhist philosophy—protects us from both the outside and the inside. “Meditation helps you take control of your own life; it teaches you to cultivate the sources of happiness and equanimity. In good, bad, and neutral times, we can enjoy a sense of well-being. Understood in this way, I think everyone should learn to meditate,” says Allan Wallace, an author and expert on Tibetan Buddhism who teaches meditation workshops around the world, including Spain, where he visited a few months ago.
Infoxicated
Digital distractions can be as, if not more, punishing than stones, and often just as sharp. While it’s ultimately possible to unsubscribe from the multimedia bombardment and banish social media and your phone (this is the option of some brave souls), mindfulness helps you consider less drastic options.
“We have the gym open every day to train ourselves to develop our attention,” says Fernando Tobías. This psychologist, who has been teaching workshops and conferences for several years under the title How to Develop Attention in the Age of Multiple Distractions, refers to the infoxication that so many of us suffer from, that state of stress or anxiety when the information you receive is greater than you are able to process. “It’s the indigestion you suffer when you feel overwhelmed. It’s hard for us to set limits and give up. It’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet. If you don’t limit yourself, you get sick,” he points out.
The initial pause to become aware of what need you have at the moment is the key to regulating your behavior. Mindfulness’s contribution is to facilitate the state of consciousness to be alert and thus be able to make conscious decisions. «If there’s turmoil inside, you become an impulse with legs, and any stimulus will set you in motion. If you’re calm, you’ll be able to distinguish the appropriate moment for each thing.»
Counting from one to 10
Being present in the body and focused on the now has never been so difficult. Even something as simple as counting from 1 to 10 without the mind wandering off into other directions is complicated. “When attention constantly shifts from one object to another, it leads to reactivity to what happens: our capacity for response is reduced, and we behave automatically,” says Ana Arrabé, an instructor of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programs and one of the pioneers in Spain of this discipline, which was born at the University of Massachusetts 30 years ago. “We live in constant alert and don’t allow ourselves to disconnect,” she says.
There’s no shortage of reasons to be stressed. Just watch any newscast any day of the week. But the key to our well-being, returning to the fable of the queen and the shoes, lies not so much in avoiding (inevitable) external events but in how we react to them. It is this response—our reaction to what happens, not the event itself—that determines the amount of stress we will experience.
The remedy against haste
Is meditation an antidote to the rush that pervades us? Wallace believes so. “Everything is faster now. Every two years we change our cell phone. There’s nothing wrong with speed in and of itself. But we’re conditioned by the pace of life and the demand to do several things at once, the feeling that we’re never doing enough.” And the avalanche of information is such that we need to be more focused; not just the mind, but the body suffers as well.
“In these times of interconnected globalization,” says Arrabé, “pressure on employees increases, and in many work environments, people are required to stay up-to-date with everything happening inside and outside the organization and to respond to requests that arrive through multiple channels (email, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, etc.) with the immediacy of a click.” This increases the tendency to multitask, and also to view the world as a more insecure and chaotic place, which leads people to “adopt avoidance-based coping strategies, guided by an ancient instinct of protection and fear.”
In his workshops, Arrabé suggests exercises to learn how to use technology more beneficially, such as setting time slots for network access. «This way, we reduce the flow of distractions during a period of work time that can be used to delve deeper into projects,» something essential in environments where creativity and innovation are important to ensure the creative process doesn’t become dispersed.
The raisin exercise
One of the first exercises this expert works with, like other mindfulness instructors, is the raisin exercise (which can also be done with a tangerine, for example). Arrabé distributes them among the participants to teach them to connect more deeply with food: first, they contemplate and touch it, to appreciate the texture; then they smell it, and finally, they taste it.
In this way, we not only become more aware of nutrients, we also have time to observe certain habits: do we put too much food on our plate? Do we use food to nourish ourselves or to escape our anxieties? What does this mean? Unless you’ve had some raisins in your hands and spent several minutes eating them while reading these lines, not much: the most important thing about mindfulness is that it must be experienced. It’s no use being told about it, even if we’ve tried.