« Meditation helps to savor existence. Not only because it makes us more able not to drown in our ruminations, which we identify faster. But also because it helps us to enjoy the good times, to which it makes us more deeply present. The funniest study on this topic was conducted around a chocolate tasting: by making participants more attentive to what they tasted, they were allowed to feel more pleasure than those who were offered distractions at the same time. »

« Because if we are so interested in meditation, we caregivers, it is because it offers its practitioners multiple benefits. The official motto of the different schools is usually not to expect anything from meditation. Just do it and see what happens. I've always struggled with that nothingness of expectation. At least in the long run. I'm probably too Western. I understood that we should not expect anything from a particular session (unlike the relaxation that we expect to relax us): more often than not, we will not feel clearer or more serene afterwards. Sometimes, on the contrary, the meditation sessions will have revealed only one thing: our difficulty in meditating at that moment. But it doesn't matter: it had to be done, as the musician does his scales, the sportsman his exercises, the monk his prayers, knowing that it makes sense. I even recognize that giving up immediate expectations is very educational for us Westerners. And that tolerating, or rather fully accepting, difficult sessions or that we think are "failed" probably increases our tolerance for imperfection and failure in our lives in general. Which, given the world in which we live, is a healthy hygiene, and a vital vaccination. »

« Meditation enriches moods and helps to regulate them. Meditation helps to raise awareness of our moods, to better understand their links with our physical sensations, to also to detect how our body conditions (tension, pain, hunger, fatigue) affect our moods. Thus the practice of mindfulness can help, for example, to make decisions (in complex situations in particular) because it improves our discernment of "somatic markers", those small bodily sensations at the source of intuition. The little pinch that one feels when one is about to say yes when one thinks no, or the discomfort in the face of someone who is lying to us or trying to impose a decision on us, or the discomfort in making a decision that seems logical but makes us uncomfortable yet: we may be better able to lend the ear, or rather the body , to all of this. Similarly, it is likely that meditation, by facilitating synthetic brain states, also facilitates problem-solving processes, conscious and unconscious: those mechanisms by which, having thought quietly about a question, the answer comes to us a little later. »