24 february 2021

By Begoña Martinez

I like the comparison that my friend and renowned neuroscientist, Richard Davidson, always makes when talking about meditation: “Meditation should be part of our daily hygiene just like brushing your teeth”.  

As he explains, it is engrained in our culture that the daily routine of brushing your teeth is a basic hygienic habit for the well-being of your buccal and digestive system.

However, we don’t do the same with our mind.  If the mind is the most important tool to lead a healthy life, we can then agree that meditation is the one single most useful and beneficial habit that one should incorporate in the daily routine to take care of one’s mental well-being!

Our brain is continuously being shaped –
we can take more responsibility for our own brain
by cultivating positive influences. — R. Davidson

How does meditation work?

Meditation is a tool for introspection, a microscope for the mind. It helps focus the mind’s eye on its own content – thoughts, emotions and sensorial perceptions – and to look at it from a defused perspective. Same as the scientist in the lab observes the molecules through a microscope. 

A Harvard study showed that
our attention drifts away from the task at
hand during 47% of the time.

You might very well be familiar with how your mind is constantly being called upon by external and internal stimuli. We are all professional mind wanderers!

In a Harvard study carried out in 2010 over 650,000 participants showed that our attention drifts away from the task at hand during 47% of the time.  Almost half of our lives! The same study showed that mind wandering directly correlates with high levels of dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Let alone the loss of personal and professional efficacy that comes with it.

Mind wandering may take you to bitter ruminations about the past (I should have told him this or that, I should have not reacted this way), to cold judgements about the present (there she goes again with the same comment) or to anxious anticipation about the future (I will not be up to the task for the Friday presentation).

As mind wandering makes it hard for the mind to distinguish the wheat from the chaff it plunges you into a blurry state where focused attention, decision-making and emotional regulation become increasingly difficult.

2 easy ways to practice your mental hygiene with meditation

To stop the engrained tendency of mind wandering, you may want to try out the following two techniques, that will help you bring you focus to the here and now.

Connect with your body and emotions:

1.     Start by asking yourself some simple questions like:

• How does my stomach/legs/chest feel right now?

• What sounds can I hear through the window?

• What is the smell in the room like: heavy, flowery, pungent?

• What feelings do I feel right now?

• What is my mind occupied with right now?

• Am I judging myself/somebody?

2.      Bring your attention to your breathing:

• Close your eyes and breathe softly

• Sense the gentle movements of your body: your chest, belly, the tingling sensation in the nose. 

• Make your breathing a stable anchor to which you can go back every time your attention is caught up by a fleeting thought, an aching sensation, or an annoying sound.

This exploration of your body and mind will go a great length to bring you back to the present moment and to what is really going on for you here and now.

Slowly, with time, as the meditation practice settles, the flow of thoughts and sensations will start to slow down. You will be able to perceive the richness of your inner world in more detail, as though the lens of your microscope had miraculously cleansed out.

The direct consequence of sustained meditation practice is a sense of space and ease. The slowing down of the thought torrent puts you in contact with a different perception of time, as though the length of a minute, an hour, a day had stretched magically, or – put it differently - as though the number of things you can attend to in that amount of time had doubled.

Beyond well-being: how to understand the nature of self?

The cultivation of a non-judgmental attitude opens doors for exploring hidden patterns and painful emotions, in a safe space. As a result, one’s sensitivity both to our own emotional patterns and to those of others increases, as does the capacity for empathy and understanding.

This type of meditation is known as Shamata in Sanskrit or calm-abiding, since it helps the mind calm down and abide in the tranquility of its own nature. While the benefits of this type of meditation are huge, as the increasing number of mindfulness programs for stress reduction or leadership development show, the true and final goal of meditation – as it was understood by Buddha himself – is to understand the true nature of self and reality. 

Through the calmness that the practice of Shamata brings about, one can perceive and experience the coming and going of thoughts, sensations, perceptions … their transient nature, their intangible essence, their interdependent origination.

The practice of Vipassana helps you
to drastically change your relationship to yourself,
others, and reality.

In that sense of space, one can finally deep dive into exploring the phenomena of the mind, both the observed object and the observing subject and plunge into a vivid direct experience of reality as it is, beyond the filters that usually taint it. This technique is called Vipassana in Sanskrit. It has been translated into Western languages as “penetrating vision” since it gives access to insights into the nature of reality. Once perceived, it can dramatically change our relationship to ourselves, others, and reality.

A truly profound experience, best experienced than talked about!

Landguet Ried offers you a few opportunities in the coming months to experience the power of meditation in your daily life.  Check it out here >

*****

Begoña Martinez is Managing Director at Landguet Ried, Center for mindful living, since December 2015. Previously, she served as Senior Programme Manager at the World Economic Forum, where she led the development of the health and leadership programmes of the Davos agenda from 2008 to 2015 and pioneered the inclusion of mindfulness topics on the annual agenda, working closely with thought leaders in the field, such as Jon Kabat-Zinn, Richard Davidson and Matthieu Ricard. She has practiced Buddhism and meditation for over 20 years under the guidance of her buddhist teacher, Gyetrul Jigme Rinpoche.