Mindfulness for the times of Covid-19
Here’s a 6-minute video on waking up the senses, becoming sensual if you will, in the present. With something as ordinary as a cup of coffee.
Noticing the smell of coffee can seem really boring. You smell it everyday. But you don’t smell it on purpose. You don’t smell it as if you had never smelt it before, as if this time just possibly the aroma will be out of this world.
Same goes for looking at your coffee, and the cup. It’s too easy to look with jaded eyes at things familiar to us: there’s my desk, my breakfast, my relative. With mindfulness we want to look with fresh eyes, the eyes that sees things exactly as they are in this moment.
While there is a goal here, to bring attention to the present, the action itself (of smelling, of seeing) is reward enough in itself, because it allows us to see the freshness of each moment.
The goal part is about becoming present, on purpose, for a reason: in order to experience relief from worries about the future. They are real and they are huge right now, no denying that. Yet we don’t need to spend too much time reading news reports. We can find relief from them and the worries by bringing our attention to the present.
All this and more is taught in The Mindfulness Workshop, Mindfulness Based - Cognitive Therapy, the 9-week workshop. Take it. With your friends. Together you can learn to savor the good part of the life we have, and to relate less stressfully to the hard part.
In Buddhism, from which key concepts of mindfulness are derived, there are 6 senses. In addition to the smell, sight, taste, touch and sound we know, they add another. The mind itself is considered a sense. So when we settle into the present we notice the 5 senses as well as mind: thoughts and emotions. This is no small idea. When we see the thoughts and emotions as events in the mind, in the present, things can transform.
When we don’t see them as momentary passing-through phenomena we identify with them: I am thinking about Covid. I am scared. But when we do see them as momentary events we dis-identify with them: they are not us. They are passing through in the moment. We can then have a sense of possibility: what will we think about and feel about next?
These are core learnings in MBCT.
