When was the last time you took a minute to breathe? Simply, for that, breathe. Without looking at your phone, talking to anyone or doing anything other than being in the present moment. We live surrounded by rush, pending tasks and screens that steal our time, attention and connection with the present. That’s why we are not happy.

This is one of the many teachings that Thich Nhat Hanh, one of the great leaders of mindfulness in the West, left us. If we are not connected to the present, we cannot be happy. Because happiness is in those little things that escape us.

The art of mindfulness

As a Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh had to walk the path of meditation. One of its branches is that of full consciousness. We must understand that the ultimate goal of Buddhism is to avoid suffering. And for Buddhists, this has one main origin: the ego.

We could spend hours debating the consciousness of the Western self and the idea of ​​the ego in the East. But what would become evident at the end of the conversation is that it is our perception of things that makes us suffer. Our brain tends to distort, to imagine, to pretend. And our ego suffers.

The ego is what causes you to take to the street every morning, without thinking about the coffee you have had, your neighbor who greets you with kindness, or the paved roads thanks to which you arrive at work on time. We are slaves to our egos, which tell us that only we exist in this world.and forgets the small details that surround us and in which, in fact, we can find happiness.

Mindfulness, or full awareness, is the art of slowing down the pace of thoughts to force ourselves to become aware. He is, as Vicente Simón defines him, author of Initiation to mindfulness, “open a loophole for silence, for the absence of activity.” Because only from that silence can we appreciate the small amounts of happiness that we have at our fingertips.

The world is a wonderful place

From time to time we should force ourselves to think that, in reality, the world is a wonderful place. Because maybe by doing so we would realize that it is true.

The professor and doctor in Buddhist Studies, Paula Arai, writes like this in The book of zen healing: “soil, sunlight, water, insects… an infinite number of causes and conditions give rise to even a simple grain of rice.

Perceiving this makes our connections with cosmic conditions palpable.including the stellar explosions that long ago generated the minerals in our food.” His is one of those great reflections that, when internalized, demonstrate the beauty of the world.

We live, after all, in a universe in which rice exists. Of all the possible universes, of all the millions of possible coincidences, we live in the world in which rice exists. Also the coffee. And the flowers. And the bees. And the Moon. And the breeze. And you. Me too. ANDWe exist in the world in which all this is possible, but alienated by the ego we forget it.

This is what Thich Nhat Hanh was referring to when he said «the present moment is full of joy and happiness, but you don’t see it because you are not attentive. If you are attentive you will see it.» And why don’t we see it? Because the ego installs us in the future and in the past

The past, the future

The ego once again sets its trap to make us believe that there is something more than the present. What we live in the past conditions us, what occupies the future scares us. And we don’t realize that neither one nor the other really exists.

By keeping the mind occupied with the past, guilt, shame and also self-deception arise. Because with nostalgia, we dress events from yesterday in new clothes, and we imagine that they were better times only because they are behind us.

The future awakens anxiety, fear and uncertainty. We are worried about not being able to influence or control something that does not yet exist. We can do nothing to change the future, because it has not yet happened.. Thinking about how we will act when a hypothetical future situation hits us in the face is absurd.

And while the ego kidnaps us in the future and the pastwe miss the rice, the coffee, the flowers, the bees, the Moon, the breeze. And you, and me.