Will mindfulness turn me into a Remainer?

Mindfulness at our all-inclusive Turkish beach resort began at 11 o’clock. Our mindfulness teacher was a tiny, smiley, flexible-looking woman who was not much bigger than the wheeled amplifier she dragged in behind her on to the beachside ‘wellbeing’ platform. With her musical voice she led us in a few brief arm stretches and neck rolls, then asked us to lie flat on our backs and think about what we were thinking about. Our intention this morning, she said, was to bring our minds back from elsewhere in time and space to the here and now and try and keep it there. This is what mindfulness is, basically, she said.

Eight of us had turned up: four men, four women, all middle-aged. We were all hungover, I think. Seven were lying on their backs on their yoga mats in a semi-circle. In the exact centre of the wellbeing platform, however, a woman who looked like Grandma in the Giles cartoons (except she was wearing a diaphanous sarong and bling sunglasses) was lying resolutely on a sunlounger imported, presumably, from the adjacent beach. Except for his head, the bloke in front of me was a solid mosaic of tattoos and the end of his beard was knotted into tiny plaits.

To begin, the mindfulness teacher guided our thoughts with her gentle singsong voice. Where was our mind? she said. If it was elsewhere in time we should try to bring it back to the present moment. If it was elsewhere in space, likewise. It usually helps, she said, to concentrate on our breathing. Had we, for example, entitled ourselves to take our fair share of the air available? Or were we, like so many, restricting ourselves to only a modest amount? And if we stepped outside our thoughts for a moment and looked at them objectively, what was their nature? Were they perhaps recurring thoughts? Were we perhaps caught up by an obsession?

I found that mine were elsewhere in time and in space and my breathing was diffident.