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| To One in Paradise, detail: the sun, symbol of the present moment |
The word "mindfulness" is often heard nowadays, as is the idea of "connecting with the present moment". But how, exactly, do we do that?
I was talking the other day to a friend of mine who is an artist and kindly explained to me the meaning of the sun in the beautiful painting that illustrates this post.
He was also telling me how, according to him, the time of the intellect was less so important in our Zeitgeist, in which the intuition was gaining always more importance. At first, because of the importance for me of both mindfulness and cognitions to nurture resilience, I was a little puzzled. Most of the "Mindfulness-based stress reduction" programs that follow Jon Kabat-Zinn's model offer both: mindfulness and cognitive (and behavioural) elements to help people to overcome or live better with either anxiety or depression for example.
When I started thinking about the concept of the 'present moment' and of ways to introduce my students to it, the answer became quite obvious. I started from the distinction between an immediate relationship to reality and a mediate relationship to reality. The immediate relationship to reality is the one granted us through our senses, whereas the mediate one, the non-immediate one is the one that is being filtered through our thoughts.
In order to connect with the present moment it became clear that we had to let go of the thoughts and focus on the sensations our bodies exposed us to.
Talking to my students, I asked them to identify the 5 senses. Jon Kabat-Zinn has exercises and meditations based on each one of these 5 senses. For hearing, he designed the concept of "soundscape", sight is less often to be found but exists and - to me - can be particularly effective with children with attention deficit. For taste, we all have heard of mindful eating (a raisin for example). Touch is at the core of any body scan and lastly smell is part of the tasting of the raisin.
By focusing on one of these senses during meditation, we can help the students we introduce to meditation gain access to what we call the present moment and can otherwise sound very mysterious.