The start of a new year can bring with it hope and happiness, especially when it comes to navigating the pressures of life. In this sense, mindfulness offers a practical solution to managing stress and fostering mental well-being.

Swati Desai, Ph.D is a psychotherapist and mindfulness expert dedicated to helping individuals achieve a harmonious state of mind through a blend of psychological tools and cognitive methods, including mindfulness meditation. Desai is also the author of Get Mindfulness Right: Unboxing the Powerful Practice for Mental Well-being, a book that debunks popular myths about mindfulness and provides practical meditation techniques.

By embracing mindfulness, we can learn to pause, reflect, and respond thoughtfully to life's challenges, ultimately leading to a more peaceful and fulfilling life. Join Desai as she unpacks the essence of mindfulness and offers practical steps to help you cultivate a calmer, more centred mind in today's fast-paced world.

Related Story: 8 Ways to Bring Mindfulness to Your Work

 

What is the objective of  mindfulness practice? 

The objective of Mindfulness practice is to reconfigure our ingrained mental habits (samskaras): change the outdated, unproductive, and suffering-inducing ones; and strengthen wholesome and joy-producing ones.  
 
Mindfulness training creates a mindful brain that is objective, non-clinging, non-reactive, compassionate, and value-based. What that means is we learn to observe what habits are producing distress to us and our close ones (e.g. financial habits, eating habits, judgments against people different from us) although such habits are tempting and hard to even recognize. But we learn to let go of the temptations and accept their harm with gentle compassion. We learn to calmly look for alternative and effective habits that fit our own environment. For example, we notice how stress shows up in our body, and learning to relax our body makes the mind feel calmer too. We also learn that greed and hatred can create more distress and letting go of such habits creates peace and calmness.  
 
This is what makes mindfulness a tool for well-being.  

Related Story: 3 Mindfulness Exercises to Improve Focus

 

Can tools like mindfulness help us make better choices? 

Yes, absolutely. People think about mindfulness as learning to be mindful of the current moment we are experiencing, and although this is true, it does not end there. As my book explains, there are a lot of aspects of mindfulness that make us self-aware and show us how our brain creates stories and leads us to narrow choices that create inevitable suffering. Mindfulness gets us ready to accept such “imperfections” in a compassionate way and teaches us to PAUSE before we choose how to react in a wiser way—a more effective way.  
 
Taking a pause to let the emotion of the moment pass by before making a choice about how to act. This can be called training in non-reactivity and non-attachment. This reminds me of an extreme case of a war veteran who was struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder from his brutal war experience. He was under mindfulness training to learn about his body sensations whenever he felt strong emotions. One day he called his mindfulness teacher in the middle of the night to thank him for saving his life. He explained that he had this strong urge to run into traffic as a reaction to some loud noises that had triggered war memories. However, his mindfulness training made him aware of the unrest he was feeling in his body. He used mindfulness tools to relax his body and waited for the physical sensation to pass. Mindfulness of the body made his trauma tangible for him and he could control it better. He made a better choice! 

 

In today’s context, when tigers are no longer chasing us, how does mindfulness help us thrive? 

The human brain has not evolved fast enough to keep pace with the amazing speed at which our modern life is evolving. It is called the ‘baggage of evolution’. So, if we don’t like our boss or our child disobeys us or our relationship becomes rocky—all such problems create the same response in our brains and the body as if we are about to be eaten by a tiger.  
 
So how do we treat the baggage of evolution? Mindfulness is awareness of the present moment in a non-judgmental, non-reactive way, with the intent to learn about the reality of the moment as opposed to getting caught in the frantic stories our brain creates. So instead of our automatic habitual reactions, we learn to pause and think about what an effective reaction would be. For example, by learning to be mindful you may learn that you have a tendency to catastrophise. This could look like: if the WIFI in your house is not working, your automatic reaction may be panicking about missing a meeting, a bad performance review, and ultimately losing your job.

Related Story: Mindfulness in Leadership Can Make You A Better Leader, Here’s Why
 
But if you pause and stay calm, you may work out solutions to your immediate problem. By practising mindfulness, we learn to observe reality, which allows us to become aware of our own ineffective habits, learn to pause at the moment, calm ourselves, and do problem-solving.  

 

In your book, you talk about how our brains create certain narratives and their effect on our self-image and relationships. Could you elaborate on this? 

Humans possess the unique ability to create scenarios to prepare themselves for the anticipated future. We are also very good at connecting the dots and creating convincing stories with the intention of keeping us safe from possible threats or motivating us into action by creating fantastic expectations of excitement. 
 
We create stories about whether someone likes us or not, interpret their words, or imagine our failures or triumphs and all this affects our relationships. All this is based on a few experiences or observations, without actually knowing the full reality. Based on our tendencies, these narratives may create a delusional self-grandiose image or a total lack of confidence and low self-worth (unless you are trained in diligent self-awareness). 

Related Story: 8 Practical Tips for Managing Your Inner Voice 

 

How do we correct the distress our stories create?

As my book explains, mindfulness will make you diligently look for reality versus assumptions and that means not to immediately believe in all the narratives created by your brain. And most importantly, you will not be attached to one fixed self-image.  
 
If you have a low self-image, like being overweight, mindfulness will allow you to notice the reality that your weight is not your entire identity. By being mindful, you are collecting data that shows that your other endearing characteristics are also part of your identity. The non-attachment training through mindfulness includes not clinging on to one identity as fixed but knowing the fluid nature of how perceptions and images are always changing.  

Related Story: Why Do We Get So Anxious About Relationships?

 

In your book, you write, “Practice makes you aware of your imperfections before you choose to change them.”  Please elaborate.

Imperfections in this case do not mean imperfect figures, imperfect speech or even imperfect health. Imperfections are our habits that create suffering for us or the ones who are close to us. Guess what, such imperfections are not easy to recognise because we tend to blame others or our destiny for our suffering. Say you have a habit of yelling at your spouse in a hurtful tirade when your spouse does something you don’t like. This creates enormous tension between the two of you. You may discard it as your spouse’s fault. Or you may decide that this is how marriages are. Conflicts and tensions are part of a marriage anyway. You may never become aware that indiscriminate anger and blame may point to an “imperfect” habit in you.  
 
But if you practice mindfulness, it makes you self-aware in a self-compassionate way. You don’t cling to your own justifications. You become aware that your anger issue is creating suffering for you both. Only this awareness will make you look at how to change this dynamic. You will be open to other choices such as communicating your displeasure to your spouse without using a blaming tirade. Or you may choose to accept your spouse’s behaviour with more compassion. Accepting our imperfections as a source of our suffering and the wish to reduce the suffering leads to the possibility of change. 

Related Story: Be More Mindful in 2025 With These Tips

 

Can you share some solutions for common hurdles while meditating? 

I call the common hurdles CRASH. These things stop us from meditating or focusing our attention on what we are deciding to attend to.  
 
C: Craving for comfort. The body starts hurting and we want to leave our chosen position to something else. Or we may start craving something else like some food we feel tempted to go and grab.  
R: Restlessness. Remembering stress/anxiety-producing thoughts can bubble up when we are quiet. We can become restless and fidgety. We may find it hard to just watch the anxiety. 
A: Aversion. We may not like something about meditating. Aversion could show up in the form of boredom. Or thoughts of hatred or dislike for a person may start showing up. You may feel anger. This may come in the way of focusing on the meditation object. 
S: Sleep. You may feel tired and too relaxed. Sleep is a common experience when we finally sit down and not move. It may also be a sign of finding the experience difficult which can lead to sleepiness. 
H: Hesitation. You may have doubts about if you are doing it right. Or if it really an effective method for reducing stress as it is claimed. You may have a lot of question marks, questions, and doubts about the effectiveness of the whole idea of meditating or mindfulness. 
 
If you start to CRASH, there are ways explained in my book that you can use to continue the training in meditation. Begin with a commitment for a certain amount of time you are going to meditate no matter what, and the number of days when you are going to try to meditate. No matter what, follow this routine and look for creative ways not to CRASH. This is a good start. Try to meditate in small doses like5 minutes at a time before you figure out what to do about CRASHing if it happens. Then move to longer meditations. Do walking meditations or mindful activities first before getting into meditation. Above all, know that CRASH is a common experience so no need to self-blame or get discouraged. Keep trying. 

Related Story: Guided Meditation with Michele Paradise

 

Do share some insights on practising engagement through mindfulness. 

Mindfulness practice leads to non-attachment and non-attachment leads to engagement in life! 

Say your natural tendency makes you assume that a friend hates you because you gave her honest feedback. You struggle with this drama in your own mind and this stops you from being honest with other friends and makes you self-conscious. Say your mindfulness practice makes you aware of how you have a tendency to create such dramas in your mind and how attached you are to your self-image of a very well-liked person. 

Mindfulness practice teaches you how things are always changing, and our self-image does not depend on just one thing (one friendship breakup is not the whole of you). This expansive view that mindfulness gives releases you from attachment to just one sliver of your entire life. This produces non-attachment because you know that a broken friendship could be mended if the need be and you don’t need to run away from the momentary unpleasantness of “I may not be the well-liked person I imagined”. If your fear of a permanent dent in your self-image is lifted, you are free to engage in your other friendships with courage and consideration, rather than shying away from them. 

Related Story: 10 Ways to Improve Your Mental Health

In a world filled with constant demands and unrelenting stress, mindfulness offers a path to clarity, resilience, and emotional well-being. Swati Desai’s holistic approach to mindfulness empowers individuals to break free from limiting mental habits, embrace self-awareness with compassion, and make wiser, more intentional choices. By integrating mindfulness into daily life, we can cultivate non-reactivity, let go of harmful attachments, and engage more meaningfully with ourselves and others. Ultimately, mindfulness is not about perfection–it is about progress. For more insightful tips for mindfulness and activities, check out Get Mindfulness Right: Unboxing the Powerful Practice for Mental Well-Being, Om Books International.

Find the book on Amazon.