What’s not mindfulness?

There is a misconception about mindfulness and it is to think that it is just something to relax and be calm. Mindfulness is a quality of mind that, fortunately, can be trained to improve people’s health.

Such training gives you certain benefits: greater mental agility, greater ability to concentrate, equanimity and a friendly attitude. You will also see that you have a different disposition to face the problems of daily life and other more complicated (the death of family and loved ones, for example), among others.

Although this practice of meditation really allows you to be calm, this is not its ultimate purpose, but to give tools for us to handle with acceptance what we have to live in the present. Martín Asuero, founder of the esMindfulness Institute in Spain, explains that mindfulness will help you navigate life better.

Another mistake is to believe that it is simply to concentrate too much on one thing. Mindfulness and concentration are not synonyms. Nor is it a practice linked exclusively to Buddhism. The expert points out that adaptations have been made to separate cultural and religious elements and to be able to achieve lay trainings to have a healthy mind.

Asuero indicates that there are different types of treatment depending on the objective. There are programs that are aimed at leadership, therapy against addictions, prevention of depression, etc.

The mindfulness is about training the mind to realize the situations we are living, act with the tools provided by meditation and feel more comfortable with ourselves.