Mindfulness and meditation:
how to live happily

Meditation , together with contemplation , is an increasingly widespread practice . Through these techniques it is possible to fix our lives quickly and easily. For those who practice them constantly, we know, this habit slowly begins to permeate their entire daily life.

We often think of meditation as a practice limited in time, which lasts for a certain interval and is limited to that time window of meditative practice – morning and evening, for example. But meditation is not a remote island in life, it is the ocean itself . By practicing regularly and observing ourselves in our mind's eye , we can notice how the skill developed during meditation sessions slowly makes its way into all the activities of our working and personal lives. We are more present when we define a project, meet a client, study for an exam, in intimate situations or when we communicate with a friend. As we carry out our daily activities, we will gradually notice an increasingly greater ability to focus and a greater awareness of what the real experience of life is. We will gradually be able to eliminate the noise and mental distractions that the mind produces. It is necessary to stop and carefully observe the relationship with the present moment: this act of contemplation becomes an indicator of the impact of meditation on life. These glimpses of presence that we gain over time are very important; they are the meeting points between our daily meditation practice and the experience of life as a continuous meditative state . It doesn't matter which specific meditation technique we practice: it is still a gateway to presence.

Psychological research conducted in this field explores the experience of presence, that is, how aware we are of our existence. When we are aware, we actively reason about the meaning of the experience, of the moment, and we increasingly take care of ourselves. The moment of awareness is the moment in which our mind does not wander; she is completely focused on the event that is taking place at that precise moment. There is an interesting study that analyzed the disconnection from the mind and presence, whose title “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind” – A disconnected mind is an unhappy mind – recalls exactly the meaning of what we are facing.

In the study, the researchers developed a smartphone application that allowed them to recruit over 15,000 participants and compile a large database of responses. With this application, participants were contacted randomly during waking hours and asked a series of questions: “How are you feeling right now?”, “What are you doing right now?”, “Are you thinking about something different?” How long are you currently doing?”. The answers made it possible to understand how pleasant, neutral or unpleasant the participants' state of mental presence was. The data collected therefore provided researchers with the information necessary to discover whether there is a link between mindfulness and well-being . The results were unequivocal: People reported higher levels of happiness when they were present and aware. Researchers have found that being mindful produces higher levels of happiness than being constantly besieged by disjointed, rambling thoughts.

This is an example of the support that spiritual concepts and ideas can gain from contemporary psychological research. The idea of ​​being “here and now” appears in countless spiritual texts and is constantly accompanied by an emphasis on the importance of meditation as a tool for achieving presence and its benefits for our well-being. We now have an abundance of psychological studies, like the one described above, that validate an area that once seemed to be “beyond the pale” for the scientific community and make it increasingly accepted.

The combination of psychology and spirituality will increasingly be at the center of our lives if we want a world of happier people. If we know how to get closer and closer to psychology and spirituality and manage to introduce them into our lives, we will all become superheroes and acquire superpowers of awareness, courage, resilience and compassion . Isn't that an amazing prospect?