Mindfulness is a stress-busting meditation technique that’s now flourishing in Belgium

I’m delicately holding a raisin between my thumb and forefinger, turning it slowly while observing it carefully. Repressing the sense of ridicule, I follow instructions to inhale its scent before popping it in my mouth. Then I feel it with my tongue before gingerly taking it between my teeth, noting each sensation as the texture of the fruit changes and releases its juice. Now I can chew and swallow it, once I’ve already imagined it travelling down into my stomach.

The raisin is actually incidental; this is a preliminary exercise in mindfulness training, the on-trend medically backed self-help skill that reduces stress, anxiety and pain as well as mental health relapses. Originating in the US and UK, mindfulness is rapidly gaining popularity in Belgium. Over the past year, I’ve listened to friends, acquaintances and even my lawyer rave about its positive effects on their lives. I’m keen to find out more.

Group classes, backed up by daily home practice, are the norm for an eight-week course, but with a hectic schedule, I’m signed up for individual sessions. An initial assessment includes an exercise for helping sleep, which involves tensing muscle groups in turn, accompanied by three deep breaths. Then I graduate to the key component of mindfulness: the body scan. Lying down with my eyes closed, my instructor leads me through the exercise. It is centred on breathing and again tours the body, albeit in greater detail. Isolating each body part, including toes, kneecaps and abdomen, I’m encouraged to engage and disengage with all the different sensations in my body. Each time my mind wanders, I’m told to bring it back gently to the breath.

The challenge now is to perform the 30- to 40-minute exercise six times a week to a recording of the instructor’s voice. I’m warned there will be occasions when it will be difficult. Learning to filter negative thoughts and look on them kindly takes practice. The aim is to be able to gradually reduce the time spent on meditation, eventually achieving similar results in a couple of minutes.

Other exercises include overriding the body’s natural auto-pilot setting, whether for everyday tasks such as cleaning teeth and showering or more pleasurable ones such as a walk in the woods or savouring a type of chocolate you wouldn’t normally eat. It’s all about living in the present rather than in your head. Mindfulness may be hard work and require a lot of practice, it may seem like a panacea for the stresses of modern living, but ultimately I think it’s worth giving it a go.

Based on Buddhist meditation and breathing exercises, the practice was founded in the 1970s by American scientist Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn. He was researching chronic pain relief and developed mindfulness-based cognitive therapy with Dr Mark Williams of Oxford University as a treatment for depression. To coincide with the second French edition of his best-seller Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness, he has recently given a sell-out lecture in Brussels.

Mindfulness remains within the medical domain and many universities in Belgium offer classes. You’re recommended to seek a qualified practitioner, but courses can also be followed through books and apps. 

The teacher

Steve Savels is a co-founder and trainer at the new Brussels Mindfulness Institute. The Belgian psychologist and life coach has been an enthusiastic advocate for the discipline since it transformed his own life. After 14 unhappy years working in HR, an eight-week mindfulness course gave him the necessary understanding to change his career. “I finally had real insight into why I felt so stuck, why I blamed myself and why I thought I needed to change everything, although it never made me happy. Mindfulness taught me to deal with situations, and that really helped me through stressful times,” he says. “My biggest reward now is seeing people changing and gaining insight into their life and doing things differently.”

Savels explains how mindfulness tackles the negative thought producing machine that is the mind. “The evolutionary theory is that for survival man needed to be aware of what could go wrong, which is why we are so negative about ourselves. So much of our life passes on auto-pilot. Mindfulness meditation helps you become aware of what you’re feeling and gives you a larger repertoire of things you can do. We have a limited set of reaction patterns; for some people it’s anger, others it’s closing down. By practising mindfulness you learn to recognise these patterns and deliberately decide to do something else.”

He describes breath as the anchor. “When you close your eyes and for a minute think of nothing, your mind goes in all directions. This is normal, but you can always return to the breath. At the beginning of a course people are really motivated and try very hard, but they have to learn it is not always possible to keep the mind fixed in one place.”

Learning to recognise and change thought patterns extends beyond stressful situations to relationships with other people, says Savels. It also helps people become more creative, which is particularly useful in a work context. “You can ask the question, What are the alternatives?, which can help you adapt to new situations.” In his parallel career as a life coach, Savels’ work focuses on stress and burnout. “People are so caught up in work, and are under so much stress, they lose control and become disengaged. If you’re not happy in work then this spills over into relationships, family, leisure time.”

The mindfulness institute, founded with two other practitioners also working in English, runs three classes a week. Students have the flexibility to move from one class to another. Savels believes the advantage of group sessions is seeing others struggling in a similar way. “People are exchanging their experiences and that can be very powerful. We have an international mix of people: EU interns, company lawyers and everything in between. Participants see people in difficulty who they would expect to be in control.

“A group can also be useful for meditation,” he says. “It’s difficult to do on your own. Sometimes you have an experience that you don’t particularly like, and the group can support you. When you’re struggling to meditate yet see everyone around you with their eyes closed, it helps you continue.”

Savels, having worked abroad in Africa, enjoys working with expats. “I admire people who have made the leap of going to another country,” he says. He admits that he and his colleagues, German Beate Trück and Dutch national Jeroen Janss, are ambitious. “We really want to reach international people in Belgium and Europe and bring mindfulness to the European institutions, including politicians. Mindfulness can help you be aware of other things beyond your own personal interests, and thereby contribute to a better society.”

This article first appeared in The Bulletin Newcomer spring 2015

Photo (c) Marie Bertrand/Corbis