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Although mindfulness has its roots in Buddhism, you don't have to be a Buddhist at all to practice mindfulness. The well-known American professor Jon Kabat-Zinn developed mindfulness training forty years ago by detaching the technique of meditation from the Buddhist context and making it accessible to Westerners. Religion is not involved in the training, but accessible meditation exercises, yoga and other ways to learn to live more consciously. Meanwhile, the MBSR (English: mindfulness-based stress reduction) and MBCT (English: mindfulness-based cognitive therapy) are very popular and fully accepted in the West.

Mindfulness refers to:

• The mindfulness training, developed to teach people to live more consciously and to deal with stress, thoughts and emotions differently.

What you may experience as a disadvantage is that you routinely have to invest time and sincerely want to open yourself to the possible insights that meditation can bring. Meditation is also not always suitable for people with psychiatric complaints, such as untreated trauma or depression that is not yet in the recovery phase.

Just like sports and playing an instrument, practice is needed to learn the skill. With meditation you train the mind to stay mentally fit; this calls for structural repetition. Daily training is especially important in the first four weeks to build up a routine and experience concrete change.

If you meditate regularly, you can have spiritual experiences. Through concentration exercises you let go of your usual thoughts and patterns and focus on the present moment. In this moment you can experience a glimpse or strong power of spiritual dimensions. Ultimately, being consciously present with body and mind is already a spiritual activity in itself. Other spiritual experiences you could have:

• Feeling of ultimate connection
• Energy flow that makes you feel wider and more in touch.
• Experience of inner sounds, colors or shapes.
• Experience of boundless, unconditional love.
• Flow of goodness and acceptance.
• Pleasant experience of the empty or ephemeral nature of everything.
• Dissolving your body in light or confluence with the environment.
• Experiencing a continuous presence of an all-encompassing tranquility.

The process of meditating is similar to building your fitness through sport, or learning to play an instrument. Only if you practice and keep doing this for a long time, you will experience the effects.

The degree and time in which you experience an effect differs per person. There are people who notice strong effects after the first time, while others notice mild effects after two weeks or only two months. Please give yourself the space and time to investigate this yourself. You will almost certainly experience positive effects in the long run.