Mindfulness approach to better health

The mindfulness approach is an effective technique to achieve higher levels of physical, emotional and psychological health, according to Dr. Rene Samaniego, consultant with the Makati Medical Center.

“Becoming aware of what is on our minds, from moment to moment, as much as we could, and how our experience is transformed when we do become aware, is what mindfulness is about,” stated the speaker.

Samaniego discussed that the default mode of operation of the human brain is to wander, referred to as stimulus-independent thinking. Most of the time, a person contemplates on events that happened in the past, might happen in the future or might not actually happen at all. A recent study showed that people’s minds wandered 46.9 percent of the time and that people were less happy when their minds were wandering. 

“A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” emphasized the speaker.

The mindfulness approach was conceptualized by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn and it highlights the importance of paying attention in the present moment. He created the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program, an eight-week program which aims to promote the mindfulness approach. This program has been adopted in over 720 hospitals worldwide as a complement to medical treatment to promote health and well-being.          

It has been used in several clinical applications, including stress reduction, cognitive therapy, overcoming substance abuse and preventing relapse, controlling anxiety and traumatic stress disorders, and treating eating disorders. 

The mindfulness approach includes practices such as meditation, breathing and yoga. Meditation is about non-doing and being oneself at a particular moment. Awareness of one’s breathing promotes mindfulness by anchoring the person in the present time. Yoga is done slowly, providing moment-to-moment awareness of one’s breathing and the sensations arising from the different yoga postures. It also helps cultivate physical strength, balance and flexibility.

Samaniego elaborated on the seven foundations of mindfulness.

The first is a non-judging attitude. It is the natural state of the mind to constantly generate judgments, but a person must make efforts to recognize when to create and when to intentionally suspend judgment.

The second attitude is patience wherein a person must learn to let things unfold in their own time and not hurry the process.

The third foundation is having a beginner’s mind or the willingness to see what is happening as if for the first time and freeing oneself of expectations based on past experiences.

Trust is the fourth foundation. It means that a person must trust himself, his feelings, intuition and goodness, despite past mistakes.

A non-striving attitude is the fifth foundation. Whenever a person strives for something, he introduces the idea that he is not okay with where he is at the moment, making it difficult to be mindful of the present.

The sixth foundation is acceptance, which involves seeing things as they are and coming to terms with such reality. It is  seeing things as they are in order for a person to respond appropriately.

The last foundation of mindfulness is letting go. There are particular experiences that the mind gets trapped into. One must intentionally counter the tendency of the brain to hold on to certain experiences and to intentionally reject others.

“Mindfulness is actually a way of being, to connect us with our capacity to see and embrace the actuality of things, in a way that can heal and transform,” concluded the speaker.