Emotions and Mindful Walking I

Professor KT Foo takes mindful walks in the Singapore Botanical Gardens. On one of his walks, he decided to paint his thoughts and feelings.

Mindfulness (translated from Pali) means mental development. It is one of those words that provoke emotions – and sometimes strongly enough to turn people away from further inquiry, let alone adopt it as a means to savour the joy of living. Before we explore mindful walking, it might be helpful to know how mindfulness (with ancient roots in Buddhist philosophy) surfaced in the Western world. And for most us, it is through Western (English) literature that we come to know of this practice.

In the 1970s, Jon Kabat-Zinn introduced mindfulness to reduce stress in modern living. He founded the Stress Reduction Clinic (University of Massachusetts Medical Centre), and since then, thousands of people have benefited from the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programmes. Over the past 50 years, researchers have shown the effectiveness of mindfulness in regulating emotions (resulting in calmness and positive changes in attitudes and behaviours). These salubrious effects are gained by awareness of our own emotional and thought processes.

Emotional well-being is fundamental to health. However, emotional health does not imply that we can be happy all of the time. The core concept of enjoying emotional health is our ability to understand and respond to the full range of emotional experiences and be at ease with them. Happiness does not come from ignoring uncomfortable feelings but from listening to our feelings and responding to them appropriately. Mindfulness, in essence, is training our minds to be more reflective and more aware of our own emotions, which in turn inform our thoughts and actions.

The nature, role, and place of emotions have been explored and debated since ancient times. In 1872, Charles Darwin published his book Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and became the first person to study emotions scientifically. He reported that the central role of emotions was to direct our attention toward things that are important for our survival and well-being.

The seat of emotions in the brain is called the limbic system. It consists of several components: the amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex. The most primitive part is the amygdala, where fear, anger, and sadness are recognised and processed. When the amygdala perceives fear, it alerts the individual to danger through signalling the hypothalamus (which, on receiving messages from the amygdala, sends out chemicals and neural impulses to increase the heart rate, respiratory rate, glucose levels, and blood flow to prepare the body for threats.) At the same time, the hippocampus retrieves memories to evaluate the perceived threat’s nature further. Finally, the processed information is projected to the prefrontal cortex (“thinking brain” – where rational thinking occurs.) If the danger is a false alarm, no actions will be required. If the threat is confirmed, a decision needs to be made to flee or fight.

This is human nature, and we have evolved in this fashion for survival and efficient day-to-day living. How we respond to emotions, however, is determined by perceptions. Our perceptions, in turn, are determined by memories of our upbringing, training, culture, beliefs, and values. Together these factors predispose us to quick judgments or emotional responses. Hence, we auto-pilot ourselves through most of our lives. Most of the time, this auto-pilot mode serves us well. However, we may need to override this auto mode to enjoy living well. Our built-in auto-responses often impair our capacity to judge more accurately and respond more appropriately. This, in turn, lessens our ability to fully appreciate the joy of living.

The central role of mindfulness is reminding us of how the auto-pilot mode runs our lives and how we can disengage the auto-pilot mode. There will be times when we decide it is more appropriate to override our autopilot and go the manual way.

To be continued: Emotions and Mindful Walking II