Mindfulness

Control your mind and emotions

Meditation and mindfulness can help you become a healthier, happier person

According to a Harvard University study, we are only fully aware of what we are doing about half the time. Which means, if you are awake 16 hours a day, eight of those are spent in a distracted, wandering state of mind.

“(The Harvard study) actually goes further to say, 80 to 90 percent of that mind wandering can be repetitive and negative, ” says Kim Rego, a mindfulness teacher and coach at Mindful Bermuda. “Typically, when we’re distracted we’re eating more, we’re drinking more, we’re talking more, we’re working more. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

Importantly, being distracted can keep us from recognising our actual feelings of sadness or being overwhelmed, and we end up, for example, just grabbing something from the fridge – without even knowing that’s what we’re doing.

The good news is this behaviour is entirely normal and through a practice of mindfulness you can train your mind to recognise when it is distracted, opening up your options on how you perceive and respond to a variety of situations.

Ms. Rego explains that, in attempting to keep ourselves safe, humans utilise a sort of built in “negativity bias.”

Physically this is seen in our instinctive actions in moments of danger, like reaching our arm across a passenger when we are driving and have to stop short – it just happens. Our minds also lean into this stay safe-mode, which is expressed through thoughts like, ‘did I do it right?’, ‘do they like me?’ or ‘have I done everything on my to-do list?’. “That’s negativity bias and it’s there just to keep us safe,” Ms. Rego explains. “But that part, if left unchecked, can have us thinking the world is coming to an end when we have a deadline, or anxious when somebody hurts our feelings or doesn’t respond to an email in time.”

One of the important goals of mindfulness is to ensure our wandering

Kim Rego

minds don’t go unchecked, and one of the tried and tested practices to counter distraction is meditation.

“What we’re doing is we’re becoming more in tune with our body and its senses its hearing, its seeing, but also its inner sense of like, ‘yeah, that’s right for me’,” explains Ms. Rego.

Meditation is a millenniums-old practice that has taken on an almost mystical status, but Ms Rego says it is very simple in its essence:

“I would simply say it’s training for the mind. We literally exercise our mind muscles and when we do this we are gaining more attention, we’re gaining more awareness.”

She is also quick to point out that while the concept sounds simple it is not easy to master: “People say, oh just sit in the present, or just be here now, or whatever. Well, that sounds really easy. And it’s not.

“When we start practising we realise how crazy our mind is.”

For that reason Ms. Rego advises people new to meditation to start very slowly, doing short, regular sessions, building up over time.

“I would say (start with) one minute a day,” she says. “If you asked any busy person if they had 10 minutes to sit and of it.

“What happens is in time your body wants more, and then you listen to it.”

Another suggestion is tying the activity to a time of the day or an existing routine, with mornings shown to be a good time for many people. of meditation can be felt quite quickly but the true value builds over time. Importantly, Ms. Rego says meditation impacts our central nervous system and in doing so creates a wide range of physical and

“It is hard to pay attention when you’re tense. When you’re worrying, ruminating, analysing, judging, prophesising,” she says. “As we start to really feel our body we get released from the mind and there is a relief from the incessant thinking.” mindfulness helps people lower their risk of heart disease by bringing down blood pressure. It can reduce cognitive decline for both ageing people and Alzheimer’s patients and it can improve your immune

Meditation can also have a very real and positive impact on your interpersonal impact of learning to be present.

“Once you have established some stability of mind, then other things are accessible to you,” she says.

One of those things is what she describes as the space between stimulus and response.

“Like when you misunderstand somebody or you snap at a loved one or colleague, these things happen to us all “What happens with mindfulness, we’re actually training ourselves to cultivate this space where you get to choose, like, I don’t want to respond to that or I noticed that I’m really sad or I noticed that I was reaching for a cheeseburger. In that space is our power to choose our response.”

As wonderful as training the mind have experienced from it, Ms. Rego says it is important to get guidance from a teacher or a community when beginning with meditation.

“If you go online and bring up the and wide,” she says. “And yet, for a small number of participants, they can report feeling more anxious or more hyper disconnected.”

Dr. Willoughby Britton, a neuroscientist at Brown University, has done extensive meditation and mindfulness. In a 2014 article, published on mindful.org, Dr. Britton says: “A lot of psychological material is going to come up and be processed. Old resentments, wounds, that kind of thing. But also some traumatic material if people have a trauma history, it can come up and need additional support or even therapy.”

While there are presently a number of apps that can help you get started with and maintain mindfulness practice, including Headspace, Insight Timer and Calm, Ms. group in the beginning.

As a teacher herself she has learned to ease people into the ideas and practice of meditating: “I often don’t start with the breath, I start with something like the feet on the ground. It’s fairly neutral. You notice how when you calm your nervous system, you have the ability to feel grounded, and be more aware and more attentive.

“One of the most powerful and loving gifts we can give others is our attention, so we’re training ourselves for that.” www.mindfulbermuda.com