He mindfulness It is a third generation psychological technique that has its origins in the Buddhist tradition. John Kabat-Zinn is one of the authors who introduced this technique to the West and who has done the most research on it. In the 1970s Kabat-Zinn developed the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program (MBSR), a protocolized eight-week group intervention aimed at managing pain and improving physical and emotional well-being.
The main objective of mindfulness It is orienting consciousness to the present moment by practicing acceptance, that is, without making judgments about experience; and he will use meditation for this.
When we talk about the present moment we mean focusing on the here and now. Normally we tend to operate on automatic and our mind flies to the past or the future more than we would like. For example, has it happened to you that after sitting down to eat you find yourself thinking about everything you have to do in the next few hours and days until you realize that you have eaten the entire meal? food without knowing? Have you ever tried to orient yourself to the present moment while eating, trying to identify what the smells and textures of the foods you eat are like and how they change as you chew?
The acceptance without judgment It simply consists of taking the experience as it comes and is given to us, without classifying it as good or bad. It seems simple, but really in our daily lives we are constantly judging what happens to us. Both external and internal experiences are constant objects of our judgments, so it will be necessary train meditating to practice acceptance.
We must do all this with full awareness. When we talk about meditating, many people tend to think that it is necessary to know or learn to blank the mind, not think. Nothing could be further from the truth! Meditating requires all of our attention and awareness and this will also require training. When we begin to meditate it is important that we be self-compassionate and understand that it is normal for us to find it difficult to maintain awareness constantly and during meditation. The usual thing will be for our mind to go to another place other than meditation. We will simply have to observe it, and as we said in the previous section, accept without judging that our mind has been distracted and bring it back to meditation.
There is extensive research supporting the mental health benefits of mindfulness. To give some examples, we will mention that the first were those that Kabat Zinn carried out with his program (MBSR), with which he demonstrated in 1992 a significant reduction in anxious and depressive symptoms. In 2000, Teasdeale and collaborators demonstrated that Mindfulness significantly reduced relapses in people suffering from recurrent depression. More recently, in 2015, Zeidan and his team showed that mindfulness managed to both reduce the perception of pain and deactivate brain areas related to it.
Mindfulness is an effective and evidence-based technique to combat different mental disorders, both by reducing symptoms and improving the quality of life of patients, which is why it is increasingly used in psychological consultations.
#Mindfulness #technique #works #full #awareness
