Mindfulness: Reduce Your Anxiety With the Help of a Raisin

What is mindfulness? The word is bandied about and often used as a synonym for focused, thoughtful or deliberate.

Mindfulness actually has a very specific meaning. It’s the practice of paying attention to here and now, using the senses. If you want to increase joy and reduce anxiety, mindfulness is the most important and simple practice you can do.

We tend to live in our heads, which is the opposite of here and now. It’s there and then. In our thoughts we’re glued to the past or the future. But life takes place in the present moment.

Our thoughts of ‘there and then’ often increase stress and distress. Which is really too bad, because thoughts are not reality. Only the present moment is actually happening.

We tend to live in this imaginary castle in the air that we create with our thoughts. We forget that all those pictures in our minds are created by our imagination. We forget that we actually live in this real room (if this was a live video I’d bang on the wall behind me to bring us all into contact with the actual physical world). We disconnect from this actual moment and walk around in the thought castle instead. 

Isn’t it strange how we suffer so much from thoughts of the past and the future when these things aren’t actually happening in reality? Think about it. Anxiety is always about something that is not happening now.

Anxiety comes and swings us around from one imagined, scary possibility to the next. We’re anxious about dozens of things at once, all with scenarios that theoretically might happen, but none of them are actually happening.  What’s more, it’s usually very unlikely that even a single one of them will actually come true. When and if something does happen, then we have to deal with it – which is far less painful than the anxiety. We suffer less if the thing happens than we do from anxiously considering the possibility that it may happen. 

So much of our suffering is about things that will most likely never happen. Anxiety is almost always a misguided attempt to control things we can’t touch. Of course we can’t, because they’re not actually happening now.

So instead, mindfulness says: live in the present moment. Or at least visit it regularly. This has 

been found to reduce stress and anxiety, and even enhance recovery from physical illness. Of course, we need to plan things, to consider possibilities and to process the past. But most of our thoughts of past and future are not this. Instead, they are an endless loop of pointless struggle. You know it’s true. 

So how do we connect to the present moment? With our senses. Look up and notice the objects around you, the colors and the shapes, the light and the shadow. Notice the sounds around you and how they rise and fall and blend into each other. 

That’s two senses – sight and hearing. Two other important senses are touch and interoception – the sensations we feel inside the body. Notice sensations and connect to here and now in the body. Here are some other ways to practice mindfulness with a focus on the body.

Now let’s get back to that raisin. If you’ve ever studied Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction or other mindfulness practices you may have done an exercise where it took about ten minutes to eat a raisin.

Let’s do this now. Go get a raisin – or any other small piece of food. Eat that raisin like you’ve never seen anything like it before, and certainly haven’t tasted it. This is called Beginner’s Mind. Have you ever seen a small child crouch down, pick up a stick and gaze at it in rapt wonder, as if it’s the first stick ever? Well, it could be that for that child, it is. For very young children, every single thing is a new experience and often a source of great joy.

Look at your raisin with a Beginner’s Mind, as if it was the first time you’d ever encountered this small, crinkly object. Hold it up to the light. Notice how the light shines differently on the tiny hills and valleys of the wrinkled raisin flesh.

Use as many senses as you can before you get to the part where you taste it in your mouth. We’ve been talking about seeing the raisin, now let’s use some other senses. Notice the feel of it between your fingers, notice its smell. Hearing is not applicable to raisins so we’ll skip that one.

When you’re ready to eat the raisin, do it slo-o-o-o-wly. This can lead to much laughter, but it’s good to let yourself experience it at least once. Slow-mo your eating experience. Watch your hand as it slowly approaches your lips. Notice the salivation as you slowly move the raisin into