Mindfulness: the key to your health
WHEN WE ARE FULLY CONSCIOUS and living in the moment, ‘an integral sense of peace is truly experienced’
Areader sent me a note recently asking me about being mindful: “You’ve mentioned it quite a bit,” she said, “most recently on your live chats, and I wondered what it is, exactly, and how one goes about achieving it. Can you give some of us direction?”
She’s right. I have mentioned mindfulness quite a bit of late – in fact, last week I said it will probably become the catchphrase of the decade when talking about health and wellness.
I really believe you have to be aware of what you are doing before you can make concrete changes.
Most of us are so busy and overwhelmed that we do things in a fog. I spoke to a colleague not too long ago who said she’s not even aware of her commute because her mind is so preoccupied with other things.
Think of something as simple as eating your lunch: Do you remember what you ate yesterday? Was it good? Did you enjoy it? Or were you too busy replying to emails or reading a book or watching television?
If you aren’t even aware of what you’re eating, do you know how much you ate? Were you even hungry when you sat down to eat? Or did you eat because the clock said noon?
All good questions because so much of what we do can be done on autopilot.
But that can be changed when you work on being aware, and I say work because it is a process and it does take time.
So, who better to ask about being mindful than someone who practi- ces it and even gives workshops on the topic?
Stéphane Bensoussan is a holistic health and educational psychologist and director of Clinique Psy-santé. Bensoussan defines mindfulness as living in the moment and being “acutely aware and conscious of every passing instance.”
He told me that when we are fully conscious we see, we smell, we sense and we hear.
Bensoussan says the concept of mindfulness is that when we are truly in this state, “we are non-reactive, non-judgmental, non-emotional.”
“As soon as you have an emotion, you are no longer present. There is judgment there of your experience.”
He goes on to say that when we are mindful, an “integral sense of peace is truly experienced when we are in the present moment.”
All too often people spend their lives worrying about the past and fretting about the future instead of living mindfully in the moment, which, truthfully, is all we really have.
The parallel he likes to use is that the mind is similar to an untamed horse: “It goes wild, everywhere, all over the place.”
How does one tame a wild horse? Well, you begin by nudging it. “Our job is to gently train the mind, not to gallivant all over but instead focus on the moment.” Of course, he says our minds naturally deviate, but with “no judgment or punishment, we need to bring it back.”
Bensoussan says we mostly experience things from a mental state but we have a better quality of life when we experience things from the body and heart.
It’s especially true of people with weight issues who have disconnected from their body. “It’s so important to reconnect them with their body and get them out of their head.”
He says we are trained to disconnect from our bodies. “We have to go into the mental process to understand and to analyze, but in school they teach us critical thinking but they do not teach us how to connect to our emotions and feelings.”
At the end of the day, awareness is the basis of mindfulness.
The beauty about being mindful, he says, “is that you can do it anywhere, any time.”
Even as you are reading this, for example, feel the chair against your back, feel your feet on the floor. It’s that simple. We obviously cannot be mindful every minute of the day; we have tasks and work to do. But Bensoussan says even just two minutes twice a day is a good start. “When you brush your teeth, for example,” he explained to me, “spend the two minutes dentists recommend we brush our teeth for being mindful: Feel the froth in your mouth, listen to the sound, feel the temperature of the water and the smell of the toothpaste.”
He says he’d rather see people start with two minutes every day than trying to do more than they can and give up.
“Changing the mindset takes time. Cultivating a new state of being, changing behaviours all begin with small steps.”
When it comes to food, he suggests we begin with one meal of the day and spend the first five minutes being mindful of every morsel we put in our mouth. He does that as part of a workshop. “Participants bring in food, and when we do this exercise, they freak out at how little they actually need to feel satisfied.”
One family that he worked with was in a state of chaos every night at dinner. Bensoussan suggested they spend the first three minutes of dinner each night without speaking so they could concentrate on the food in front of them. Then they could chat. “The mother reported back that it worked wonders. They eat in a more relaxed way: The kids were calmer; even the quality of the conversation was so much better.”
Jon Kabat-zinn directs the Stress-reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, and has taught mindfulness meditation to more than 6,000 patients, Bensoussan says. KabatZinn has released studies proving the benefits of mindfulness meditation. According to Bensoussan, these studies have shown that “it’s been proven to reduce stress, chronic pain and helps to decrease depression and anxiety.”
Pretty neat for something that can begin with just a few minutes a day.