Modern life

What is Mindfulness?

UNLESS you had been living in the Saharan desert or under a rock, it would have been impossible to avoid news stories about mindfulness over the past few years. Yet the term is nebulous. I myself have attended an eight-week course on mindfulness and I’m still a little unsure what it means.

At its simplest, mindfulness is a meditation technique derived from Buddhist tradition but reinvented in the Western world by an American academic called Jon Kabat-zinn. In 1979, he developed practices of ‘mindfulness-based stress reduction’ to treat patients at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. It has now been adopted by everyone from MPS, actresses and pop stars to chief executives at Apple, Sony, Ikea and the Department of Health. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) now even recommends mindfulness-based cognitive therapy as a treatment for depression.

Kabat-zinn’s most often quoted line defines mindfulness as ‘paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally’. Such a state is cultivated by meditation exercises that, in theory, allow us the opportunity to stop and see what is going on around us, to recognise our unconscious patterns, and to touch base with our feelings.

The teacher on the course I attended was Anna Black, a mindfulness coach, publisher and writer. I wanted to develop a tool to manage high levels of anxiety. ‘Mindfulness meditation encourages the development of qualities such as patience, acceptance and equanimity,’ she told me. ‘It increases our capacity to deal with stress, chronic pain and illness with a greater sense of skill and wisdom.’

And did it? Well, some of the techniques have proved helpful in making me feel calmer and more grounded, especially the breathing exercises because I’ve found that how I’m breathing often reflects how I am. Engaging more consciously with my breath connects me to my body and helps focus my attention. Open, expansive breaths make me feel open and expansive. Breathing is a really good way of collecting oneself in the face of strong emotions.

One particular breathing exercise works as follows. Lift your hand to your