“Meditation Is A Powerful Tool For Personal Development”

As long as we practice it properly and on a regular basis, meditation can become a powerful personal development tool that reconfigures through the relevant brain changes that it produces – the way we relate to ourselves, to people and to the reality.

Santiago Segovia, professor of Psychobiology at UNED and director of care at the Elea Psychoeducational Institute in Madrid, explains it to us , where he directs the Mindfulness Based Mental Balance (MBMB) program. Segovia is the author of the book Mindfulness: a path of personal development (Editorial Desclée de Brouwer).

Mindfulness helps each person to find the meaning of existence. Although, as I see it, the only meaning of life is to live it. Then each one has to find the meaning of how they want to live it. It is about finding the meaning of how to live what I call living ”, explains Santiago Segovia from his residence in Madrid.

“Meditation changes the way we relate to life”

-And how does meditation get rid of the suffering inherent in existence itself?
-First we have to practice it in a correct and orderly way, then mindfulness helps us calm down and calm down because it balances the autonomic nervous system and the central nervous system and, from that bodily serenity, we can begin to identify ourselves with that state of consciousness called state of witness consciousness or mindful consciousness, different from the ordinary state of consciousness. From this state of witness consciousness, the way we relate to life changes: we will be able to regulate our emotions, develop a kind and friendly attitude in interpersonal relationships and even when we enter into relationship with objects and with nature. With regular practice we can even take a third step and enter what psychologists call a cognitive restructuring, that is, make a reinterpretation of reality by seeing the most basic characteristics in everything that happens to us. All of this converges in alleviating that existential anguish that, as the existentialists explained, derives from the mere fact of realizing that we have been thrown into life.

-Do we begin to see reality distanced from our interpretations of it?
-Yes. Fundamentally, mindfulness helps us not to listen so much to the thoughts we have about reality and about ourselves. Because, ultimately, we do not relate to reality as it is, but from our interpretation of what it is. With the practice of mindfulness we can disidentify from these interpretations, often erroneous and dysfunctional, and install more functional and healthy interpretations. Interpretations far removed from the automatisms and prejudices that we have and that are closer to reality as it is. Those thoughts that lead us to relate to reality in a harmful way are diluted as we train our attention and take possession of it. Attention is very important because it filters, from among the magma of stimuli that we continually receive, those that are presented to our consciousness. It is what leads us to be aware of what we are experiencing at a given moment. For this reason, learning to regulate attention and, therefore, what it is that we present in each moment to our consciousness about what we are experiencing is the difference between taking us to heaven or hell. When attention tends to get hooked on dysfunctional interpretations, I will end up in suffering. On the other hand, if with practice I educate her to disidentify myself from those dysfunctional interpretations, I make room for more positive interpretations of what I am living.

-It seems simple … Do these changes translate into changes in the structure of the brain?
-There is no magic, everything is training and requires learning and perseverance until one begins to feel its profound effects. If a very stressed person pays attention to their breathing, it promotes the balance of the autonomic nervous system, but the improvement will not last if they do not continue with the practice until the shaping of their neural activity is reversed. We all have neural circuits that are more facilitated than others and that are the ones that we go through most frequently. It is about, with regular practice, extinguishing those “neural pathways” of suffering and installing other circuits that generate more well-being. But this requires constancy. For example, the eight-week mindfulness program known as MBMB is too short to fully accomplish. We offer during an academic year one hour a week to learn to practice meditation with an instructor so that, after this time, the person can continue with their practice individually, although it is always advisable to return to a group practice from time to time. in time. In those of long-distance meditators, it has been proven that there is a thickening of the cerebral gray matter, the area of ​​the brain where the bodies of neurons are housed, especially in areas of the brain related to attention. Meditation has been proven to prevent memory loss, which is related to less neuron loss over the years and thickening of the brain’s gray matter. In some areas of the brain also the white matter of the brain, the place where the axons of neurons are grouped, registers a higher density. In great meditators there is not the usual deterioration with age.

-And at the brain level, how is the improvement in our emotional state explained?
-With meditation, the activity of an area of ​​the brain related to positive emotionality is increased, it is the anterior medial area of ​​the left cerebral hemisphere. We also know that the amygdala, the brain center related to emotions such as fear, is deactivated. This is achieved with the regular practice of serenity meditation, a common practice in mindfulness. In contrast, those meditators who practice compassion report greater amygdala activation and when they are shown photos of suffering people during the experiments, they show greater than average empathy. That is to say: the practice of serenity leads to deactivating the amygdala and therefore emotions such as fear and anger, while this compassion meditation activates it by increasing people’s empathy and sensitivity to the suffering of others. Neural network by default, a set of brain nuclei that work as a team and generate all that continuous wandering that we have in the head.

-Do you mean repetitive thoughts?
-Yes, mental wandering. It is what Saint Teresa called “the madwoman of the house” or the Buddhists call “the monkey mind”, because they are thoughts that jump from one thing to another. The continued practice of meditation deactivates this great neural network that causes a lot of suffering and leads us to be invaded by negative emotions. This neural network is activated when, for example, I have had a fight with a coworker at 9 in the morning and at 12 at night I am still hooked on what happened and I continue to rage against him and his entire family.

-Is meditation a good antidote to stress?
-Nature is so wise that early in the morning it provides us with the dose of cortisol that we will need throughout the day. However, in experienced meditators this morning cortisol peak is lower than in other people, making them less vulnerable to stress. The stress hormone can be very harmful to health.

-In addition to helping us preserve memory, mindfulness has anti-aging effects.
– Seems that if. The practice of meditation increases the activity of telomerase, an enzyme that the body secretes to prevent telomere shortening. Telomeres are the ends of chromosomes, which become shorter over the years, that is, with age and successive cell divisions we lose genetic material. Meditation increases telomerase levels thereby preventing this aging-related shortening.

-You mentioned two types of meditation practice: serenity and compassion, which had different effects on the amygdala. Could you explain what each of them consists of? Let’s start with the practice of serenity
– In the practice of serenity the attention is focused on the breath. Some Tibetan traditions focus their attention on the Tibetan letter “A”, but focusing attention on the breath has the advantage that one can meditate anywhere and also the breath is closely related to our emotional states. In the face of emotional activation, breathing becomes short and fast, while when we are calm it tends to be slow and deep. When we pay attention to the breath, thoughts begin to invade us that lead us to ramble about the past, the future or the present. Once we realize this, we must raise our attention to the breath again, but with equanimity, that is, without criticizing ourselves. You learn to regulate your attention, to detach yourself from your thoughts, and to calm your mind. The ability to concentrate increases and we will develop perseverance and patience, two important virtues in daily life.

-And the practice of kind love?
The practice of kind love and compassion is directed to the world of relationships. Through this meditation, as we do it in MBMB, a feeling of love and goodness is generated in the precordial area, that is, by focusing on experiencing this feeling right in the center of the chest. We focus our attention on this area and begin to feel that we breathe slowly and deeply through the chest, which generates cardiac coherence that calms us. From that state of well-being we will begin to develop a feeling of goodness felt right in that same precordial area. It will help to evoke a situation in which they have been kind to us or we have shown compassion. And, continuing with that breathing centered on the chest, we are going to intensify this feeling of goodness. When this feeling is settled we direct it to a person that we imagine before us and we express this wish: “I wish you to be well, that you are happy.” Once this felt love is expressed, we return our attention to the cardiac plexus to reconnect with this feeling of goodness and, from there, from this experience, I once again express the wish: “I wish you to be well, that you are happy.” So I am expressing the desideratum from the felt sensation and not as something unrelated to my feeling. So I keep body and mind together. It is about going from the cognitive to the feeling in the precordial area and from the feeling to the cognitive. This practice can also be done by wishing the best for oneself or for oneself.

-Finally, the practice of serenity
The practice of serenity allows us to access calm and a witnessing state of consciousness, while the practice of compassion is directed to the world of relationships. When this practice of compassion is directed at oneself or oneself, the same protocol is followed and it is said: “May I be well, may I be happy.” This practice of self-compassion is very rewarding.

-Why do we mistreat each other so much?
-Yes. We criticize ourselves a lot. But with the practice of serenity we are also taking care of ourselves because it helps us to develop an attitude of not resisting before thoughts, but also not surrendering to them. And this helps me to stop criticizing myself and deactivate the perfectionist that I carry. We begin to polish and tame it through equanimity. I started teaching mindfulness because I saw the changes it produced in me. Some of them are very obvious and some are more subtle. But in general, mindfulness changes the way you relate and modifies your basic emotional reactivity. There are three styles of emotional reactivity to a difficulty or an obstacle: we are avoidant or we are confrontational or we prefer to stay still to see if it happens and nobody sees us. We all use these three styles, but we have one that is our favorite. Confrontational people have a reactivity based on aggressiveness. With avoidance, it is very difficult to talk about a problem or conflict. When, for example, a confrontational and avoidant couple meet, one wants to talk about the problems while the other constantly escapes. The practice affects our favorite style of reactivity, so that confrontational people tend to stop getting irritated and offer another type of response; the avoidants learn that nothing happens to speak and face problems and can sustain the fear and anxiety that this generates and, finally, people who remain immobile in the face of a challenge also begin to face and build confidence in themselves. There are also changes at other levels. For example, you develop more work capacity because you focus your attention more and therefore fatigue less and also because you can face complicated situations without so much tension. You stop going from one place to another in a hurry, simply because you don’t feel like running and you order your life to get everywhere with ease.

-And how do relationships change?
-The relationships change notably because we stop objectifying people. And to the extent that we no longer treat or see them as things and begin to see them as human beings, to feel compassion for them, our way of treating them is softened. We think about how we can make life easier for them and that generates great changes in our relationships. It is about transcending the ordinary mode of consciousness into something bigger and more open. And, from my point of view, one can feel that transcendence without sharing a religious model. For me it is as Santa Teresa used to say: seeing God among the kitchen pots because I am more aware of what is happening around me.