The Mindful Revolution
Finding peace in a stressed-out, digitally dependent culture may just be a matter of thinking differently
The raisins sitting in my sweaty palm are getting stickier by the
minute. They don't look particularly appealing, but when instructed by
my teacher, I take one in my fingers and examine it. I notice that the
raisin's skin glistens. Looking closer, I see a small indentation where
it once hung from the vine. Eventually, I place the raisin in my mouth
and roll the wrinkly little shape over and over with my tongue, feeling
its texture. After a while, I push it up against my teeth and slice it
open. Then, finally, I chew — very slowly.
I'm eating a raisin. But for the first time in my life, I'm doing it
differently. I'm doing it mindfully. This whole experience might seem
silly, but we're in the midst of a popular obsession with mindfulness as
the secret to health and happiness — and a growing body of evidence
suggests it has clear benefits. The class I'm taking is part of a
curriculum called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) developed in
1979 by Jon Kabat-Zinn, an MIT-educated scientist.
The raisin exercise reminds us how hard it has become to think about
just one thing at a time. If distraction is the pre-eminent condition of
our age, then mindfulness, in the eyes of its enthusiasts, is the most
logical response.
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