Being Mindful: Benefits of Mindfulness Training to Ease Life’s Stress

I set out this summer intent on making the most of my time. After more than two years of living in a Covid straitjacket, I was eager to fill my days with as many adventures as I could. Here's some of what I did.

I started out the summer by taking a course on Mindfulness. The course was more than I expected it would be. It taught me that through meditation, I can take control of my thoughts. By focusing on my thoughts, I can train myself to deal with stressful situations more calmly. I can also use it to be more focused by making me think more clearly about what I need to do. I find it helps me to prepare how to communicate my message to others. For example, I can use meditation to think positive thoughts about others and not to judge others, and to practice what I want to say in my head.

The first way we practiced meditation/mindfulness in the course was through yoga. Every morning for at least an hour, my teacher would have our class do yoga led by a trained instructor. Much of our focus was on our breathing. The experience was overwhelmingly positive because I found myself becoming calmer and more relaxed. I was able to focus most of the time, but sometimes my mind would roam. And when that happened, we were taught to bring our thoughts back to our breathing.

I think yoga can benefit all students. Students can easily become worn down from the intensity of study and the feeling of always needing to push yourself. Yoga can help students feel more relaxed, become energized, and can be done with limited space and time.

Not only did the yoga improve my mental state, but it also encouraged me to do deep stretches throughout my body. Doing certain poses like Child and Warrior, I had a hard time concentrating on my breathing and doing the poses simultaneously as my body would feel sore and that would distract from my breathing. However, the experience taught me just how important the connection is between the mind and body.

Another activity we did was called beditation. This was when the whole class would lie down on yoga mats and just focus on our breathing. The only problem with this activity is that I fell asleep. I think that having teenagers lie down for an hour at 9am in the morning was probably not ideal for focusing on the task. Had this activity taken place later in the day, I think I would have been able to feel more of the effects of the lesson.

We also did an interesting activity where we had to eat chillies. At the start of the lesson, our teacher said that spice, or the chemical that makes us taste spice, cannot damage your tongue, or affect your health. The point of this activity was to eat super spicy hot sauce and then see if you were able to bring your mind off the heat and just focus on your breathing. At first before trying it, I felt really scared to try the hot sauce because although I pride myself on being able to handle spice, the level of spice my teacher was having us try was much hotter than what I had tasted before – in fact, a few hundred times the spice level of Tabasco. I used techniques we had learned on the previous two days and really tried to focus my mind. I think this helped the spice tasted milder than I had anticipated, and I was able to tolerate it. This activity allowed us to put into practice the things we had been learning and convinced me of the mind-body connection, and that through our thoughts we can mitigate pain by focusing on something else.

Another activity we did was floating. We went to a sensory deprivation center where we floated in a tank full of very salty water in a pitch-black space for an hour. Going into this experience, I didn’t know what to expect since everyone I know who had done this previously had different experiences. At first when floating, I experimented by trying to sink, trying to move myself around, and trying to just relax. Then, after my initial testing phase, I slowly started to relax and just let my mind go. I think this experience was useful in eliminating all your sensory input and just leaving your brain to think with as little distraction as possible. You couldn't hear anything unless you talked, couldn't see anything, and couldn't feel anything since the water you floated on matched your body temperature. My experience got interrupted though when I accidentally got water in my eye. Since they pour bags and bags of salt in the tank to help you float, it stung a lot. However, they give you a spray bottle and a towel to wipe your face off. Then after a little bit more time had passed, I got water in my eyes again but this time since it was dark, I accidentally knocked my towel into the water so I couldn't even wipe my eyes. Overall, I thought this experience was definitely interesting and educational because it taught us how our surroundings are just distractions to our minds and that if we eliminate all these distractions then we can truly think deeply and mindfully about things.