“If You Increase Awareness, The Changes In Your Life Come By Themselves”

Living through crises fully is possible, says Jon Kabat-Zinn, a promoter of mindfulness in the West. Moreover, he says, if we increase awareness, the changes in our life come by themselves.

But it does not remain in a vague and imprecise statement, but this researcher has spent years dedicating his life to scientifically evidence something that human experience has recognized for years: exploration, introspection and deep connection help us to generate lasting changes.

Thus, as stated in an interview with the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia , thanks to mindfulness or, what is the same, thanks to mindfulness, we are able to actively pay attention to the present moment without judging.

The mindfulness is nothing gurus

Although it sounds bombastic and alternative, behind the term mindfulness there is a large amount of scientific medical and psychological research that supports that this conjunction of zen meditation and vipassana is highly beneficial for us.

We could say that mindfulness proposes increasing our consciousness to achieve a change in attitude, perspective and life. They do not tell us to fall in love with life, but rather to accept it and experience it as such.

This is a novel approach, because virtually all of our Western health disciplines are geared toward eliminating symptoms, alleviating discomfort, destroying chaos, and the need for “normalcy.”

Sustain the experience from the presence

At school they teach us to think to solve but, nevertheless, mindfulness seeks to simply experience the experiences to achieve change or deepen what is oneself and what is around them.

Neurological changes after mindfulness training occur in regions related to learning and memory, which widen. Specifically, the amygdala is reinforced, and remember that this is the sentinel of our emotions, as it is responsible for reacting to threats and warning the rest of our brain.

Moreover, in the aforementioned interview, Kabat-Zinn refers to the fact that the results indicate a modification in the genome of the trained people. Specifically outlines these findings:

• The genes that have to do with inflammatory processes and, therefore, with cancer, are inhibited.
• The density and size of the brain, which shrinks over the years, ceases to do so if you meditate.
• Neural connections emerge and multiply.

Awakening consciousness

How can we achieve all this through mindfulness ? What is the truth that transcends it? There is no answer for this. It is simply about stopping living asleep and starting to be awake. Without doing anything or trying to change, just meditating and becoming aware (something that undoubtedly requires a lot of discipline).

Thus, for example, if we embrace negative thoughts that cause us to enter a harmful spiral, we will prevent them from continuing to reproduce. It is obvious that not everything is beautiful in life, we simply have to increase our awareness to stop feeding it.

Because a distracted mind is an unhappy mind. Only if we combine and bring everything together in one, we will achieve health, well-being and wisdom. Because “cultivating mindfulness is a radical act of sanity, love, and compassion for yourself.”