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Úrsula Calvo: «Meditating is not stopping thinking or putting your mind blank»
Mindfulness
The mindfulness expert, Úrsula Calvo, dismantles the false beliefs around meditation and explains how it can help against stress
Úrsula Calvo tells that she was always a successful businesswoman, but that before starting in the mindfulness in reality his life “was not life.” After suffering the devastating effects of stress on her body and mind, she decided to enter the world of meditation. That was more than 15 years ago and she is now president of the Spanish Association of Meditation and Mindfulness Instructors, as well as founder of Úrsula Calvo Center, where she teaches programs for success and personal and professional balance. Through his lectures and articles, he inspires thousands of people to discover their potential and to live healthier and more mindful lives.
What is capable of doing stress, that with which we live on a daily basis and that we see so normal?
El Stress it wreaks havoc on health and there are already hundreds of studies to confirm it. It is the indirect cause of most of the diseases of the West such as coronary heart disease or heart attacks in young people; from degenerative diseases, infectious diseases and lack of sleep. Furthermore, stress is indirectly related to inflammatory diseases or even cancer. It is something to take very seriously.
One thing is called positive stress, which is one that has to do with the body’s natural reaction when faced with danger and that is thanks to which man has survived many things since the beginning of time. And something very different is what we live now. It has gotten out of hand. In this competitive and unreal world, stress causes illness. That is why it is convenient to see, observe and reflect so that we are able to realize what causes us stress.
About the triggers of stress there is a concept that you work with often and that is acceptance, do you have to resign yourself to not stress?
People confuse acceptance us resignation or with complacency or even with him pasotism or with the fact that things do not matter to us. But it is quite the opposite. Accepting is a matter of common sense and realism. It implies realizing that what is “already is.” And if “already is” it means that you have two options: either ally yourself with it and with life and use whatever arises to move forward; or spend your entire life fighting it knowing that you are going to lose XNUMX% of all battles. You can have a value judgment, it may seem pleasant or not, fair or not, convenient or not … It is your judgment, from your limited perspective, from your intellectual capacity and from your previous experiences, but you do not have a global or general vision of life. But the fact of saying “I don’t understand it but I can’t change it either” It implies that I am not going to waste my energy, my health and my quality of life fighting against something that “already is.”
From that acceptance I can use my ability, my intention, my effort, my work and my life to transform that. Accepting is smart, but we believe that if I accept something, I will become an amoeba. It is not necessary to think if it is good or bad, but rather that “it already is.” What I have to do is stop reacting, complaining, fighting in vain to respond in the best possible way. And this is something very liberador, reduces stress and increases quality of life.
Pride, fear, expectations, denial… What emotions can be blocking that acceptance?
In a simple and summarized way, what blocks is fear. Everything else is derived from fear. It is true that there are six basic emotions according to emotional intelligence (although there are as many theories as there are theoretical). But if you realize it, observe them and experience it in yourself all those emotions seemingly unpleasant things that make us deny what is come from fear. Fear as a state of mind is the most blocking. It is a mental state of denial because “I am afraid” because I base any experience that I am living on what I have already lived before, taking into account that what I have already lived before I have also interpreted with fear and project my experience of the past on the future. With which it is a loop from which it is difficult to exit because I do not open myself to new options.
And how does a person open up to new options?
Accepting what is and seeing what happens. Instead of denying any emotion or denying things that happen I will allow myself to accept it (“Acceptance is the opposite of fear”) And see what happen. You realize that you can live life with emotions, you can live sadness, anger and fear without fear of fear. And when you live it with acceptance, you realize that nothing happens. I have spent my whole life being afraid of experiencing something that, when in reality I allow myself to live, I realize that nothing is wrong. I’m just living
Why do many people think that meditation must be very difficult?
Meditating is not difficult, what is difficult is to stop thinking. And people associate meditation with stopping thinking. They try and sit with the idea of going blank and think that this is not for them. They believe that all that amount of thoughts that come to them, they come to them because they have sat down to meditate, but those thoughts were already there before. Those thoughts come “standard.” And that’s where they get mixed up. They start a fight against something as natural as thinking. And thinking is not a problem.
Meditating is not stopping thinking but to realize that thought is an experience that you have but that you are not. You don’t have to believe it and that frees up a lot. But that is not well understood. Understanding it is the first stumbling block. And to that we must add the “mental stiffness” …
What are “mental sores”?
There are many excuses for not meditating. What if “I don’t have time”, what if it “gets on my nerves”, what if “I’m not good for that”, what if “I don’t have patience”, what if “it’s useless” … That’s what I call “Mental pains.”
“I don’t have time” is usually one of the most common. But what I usually ask is how they can have time to devote to having about 60.000 useless thoughts a day. That amount of cháchara mental it does not contribute anything and 90% is repeated from previous days and takes a lot of time. If you meditate, you change a little bit of your day for a long time of mental chatter. In fact, one of the advantages of meditation is that time becomes more elastic.
To avoid these “mental lapses” you have to know them well and know what effect they have on us. Knowing them we can fight against them.
What is meditation for
Úrsula Calvo participates in the First National Congress of Science and Mindfulness (March 14 and 15, in Seville). A meeting, organized by the National Wellness Center, in which scientific studies published so far that collect the benefits of mindfulness and meditation for health will be announced.