Mindful travel: its characteristics and benefits

Mindful travel is a relatively recent phenomenon that unifies the functions and benefits of Mindfulness with the experience of traveling.

The resulting combination is a path that allows us to go a long way in learning emotional management and focus modulation. attention in many life situations, and that has been shown to be particularly effective when dealing with stress problems and anxiety. If you want to know what it is, keep reading.

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What is Mindfulness?

It is possible that you know several people from your closest environment who in their day to day practice exercises of what is known as Mindfulness (or Full Attention, in Spanish). There are those who do it as part of a treatment applied to a health problem, and there are also those who simply incorporate it into their daily life as a well-being resource that helps them maintain a correct emotional balance in the face of challenges and changes in life. life.

And it is that during the last decades Mindfulness has become a powerful tool increasingly used in various fields: it is applied both in the context of psychotherapy and in the world of Work and Organizational Psychology, and even in educational centers, since several Mindfulness exercises are so simple that they can be applied to children's classes. It is not by chance: what was initially developed as a model of psychological intervention to treat stress problems has now been adapted to meet various needs.

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origins

Mindfulness has two facets: one of them is the most pragmatic and operational, and it is Full Attention seen as a set of techniques of modulation of the attentional focus and management of emotions, which despite being similar to relaxation techniques are not exactly the same; the second is Mindfulness as a philosophy of life that gives us a way to interpret and analyze the world and the problems and opportunities it brings us.

This last facet is reflected in a wide variety of actions and beyond the specific moments in which we propose to dedicate a few minutes to Mindfulness; however, it should be noted that Mindfulness is not tied to any particular religion or ideological system.

In its origins, Mindfulness emerged as a technique inspired by Vipassana meditation, which connects with ancient practices linked to Buddhism and Hinduism; however, it has been developed as a set of practices detached from any form of mysticism, tenets of faith or symbology, through scientific research that can verify the objective effects of the use of Mindfulness in the face of needs and problems concrete. In other words, although Mindfulness is inspired by religious practices, it has been designed as techniques of secular character and that can bring benefits to people of all kinds, regardless of their religion or absence her.

This methodology to achieve states of relaxation and focus has become very popular throughout the world for more than 30 years thanks to scientific research and rigorous outreach work by various psychologists, neuropsychologists.

One of the fathers of Mindfulness as a therapeutic resource used in the fields of medicine and psychology is Doctor Jon Karabat-Zinn, who created the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program at the University of Massachusetts.

This is one of the most widely used programs today. reduce stress and other associated psychological disorders through the practice of Mindfulness at a scientific and reproducible level.

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goals

As we have seen, although the origins of Mindfulness are found in Buddhist and Hindu meditation, today the habitual practice of this technique is unrelated, in the majority of cases, of any religious content or spiritual.

The main goal of mindfulness is focus attention on the here and now of the person, achieving a deep state of consciousness, emotional balance and self-knowledge that is not weighed down by thoughts obsessives, unfounded fears, catastrophic predictions and other psychological phenomena that feed anxiety or even pain physical.

When this practice is trained enough, it allows you to separate the person from their thoughts and identify and neutralize all those negative or blocking thought patterns; It is not about completely eliminating them, but about seeing them for what they are and letting them pass through the state of consciousness, so as not to give them more power than they have and let them burn themselves out, leaving us only the relevant information they carry with him.

For this reason, practicing Mindfulness is not even totally avoiding physical or emotional pain (a strategy that in most cases has an effect contrary to the desired one) or leave the mind "blank", since the latter is impossible and trying to achieve it only contributes frustration. Is about assimilate sensory and mental experiences from a constructive logic and acceptance of life.

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How to learn it?

Currently you can find various centers that offer Mindfulness courses throughout the Spanish geography, where instructors specialized in teaching mindfulness work. practice Mindfulness techniques from scratch or to advanced levels.

These Mindfulness courses are highly recommended for anyone who wants to improve in various areas your life or your mental health and increase your performance and emotional well-being both personally and professional.

But nevertheless, It must be taken into account that although Mindfulness is embodied in various exercises and practices (i.e. there is no single way to put Mindfulness into practice, which is part of its positive qualities because it adapts to various contexts), there are some more complete learning processes What others. It is one thing to spend four minutes closing your eyes and applying a simple Mindfulness exercise, and another thing is, for example, Mindful travel.

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What is mindful travel?

In short, Mindful travel consists of taking advantage of the potential that the trips to learn to be in the present moment in an environment that encourages this type of learning: environments that greatly facilitate the task of "disconnecting" of the old dynamics of thought and experimentation of emotions and that tie us to the past and to predictions of the future.

In other words, in Mindful travel we use to our advantage the influence that certain spaces have on our mental state, so that they participate in the process of generating Mindfulness and direct our attentional focus towards the moment Present.

Why do these spaces affect us in this way? Mainly, because on the one hand they have been selected to provide us with moments of calm and tranquility, with stimuli that induce us to a state of relaxation, and on the other, they keep us away from the stimuli that we associate with our daily lives or our past, so that we are not exposed to constant reminders of what stresses us, worries us or makes us go through evil.

Thanks to this mental "reset", we learn to take the first steps in managing our attention in a place that facilitates it, so that when we return to our lives, we do not depend on being in a specific place to practice Mindfulness and we can apply it in a much greater variety of situations.

Do you want to take advantage of the potential of Mindful travel?

If you are interested in participating in the Mindful travel experience, we invite you to embark on the Mindfulness and meditation programs of Life Changing Trips Directed by coach Félix Cuellar.

This platform organizes trips to selected destinations to carry out Mindfulness programs with the support of instructors with extensive experience in this field.