Thursday, May 21, 2026

Thursday, May 21, 2026

We’ve practiced variety of meditations including Loving-Kindness meditation, Full-Body Scan meditation and guided meditation. Different meditations train and develop different mental habits. At home you may practice any one of these. Whatever you practice will improve. 

Mindfulness takes hold when we learn to concentrate on our inner self. We become aware of our sensations, emotions and thoughts. We become aware of our conscious self. 

When we pay attention to the in-flow and the outflow of our breathing, it connects us to the present moment. The brain’s executive center, prefrontal cortex, located behind the forehead, gives us ability to anticipate the future, and recall the past. By thinking we let the stress hormones rise and worsen the experience of our physical and emotional pain.  

Regarding this, Jon Kabat-Zinn the famed meditation teacher describes a ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat that he participated in. The participants spent the first three days to focus on the breath to build concentration. The next seven days were spent to systematically scan the body sensations, from head to toe, over and over again. 

In these sessions not a single voluntary movement was allowed. At one such session Jon felt a level of pain that he had never experienced in his life. As he sat with that unbearable pain and scanned his body to focus on his sensations, he noticed that the pain dissolved into pure sensations. There and then he had this insight: maybe sitting in a posture and not moving even an iota was the way that could benefit his patients who experienced chronic pain that won’t go away. 

So the same year, i.e. 1979 he began his MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) program now known around the world. However, most of his patients couldn’t sit still for long periods of time so he adapted a method from his yoga training called Lying-Down Body Scan Meditation. The key point of this practice was to show that it was possible to register, investigate and transform our relationship to whatever we are sensing at a given place in the body, even if it is highly unpleasant.

Jon explains why this happens: Pain is in the brain. It unifies the pure sensation of pain with our fear and dislike of the pains we have already experienced. But when we mindfully investigate and pay attention only on the current pain, our aversion to pain falls away and breaks down into subtler sensations such as throbbing, heat, intensity. 

With mindfulness we feel the pain, but our thoughts and emotions do not react to the pain. This attitude reduces pain to several degrees. With mindfulness we have better emotional control and mental clarity. With undisturbed mind we are more resilient and feel less pain.