Draft Version - Mental Meditation

Draft

As I already started my last academic semester 5 weeks ago, I knew and learn the word of mindfulness. From what I read and understand through notes, lecture classes and also some additional reading materials given as well as from online database, mindfulness is being aware by taking note to observe and knowing what is going on and happening around either within ourselves or outside the world (Ericson et. al 2014). Getting knows the information that is new for us and accepting the information without the feeling of does not like or do not wish to be true. It is a concept of mental meditation that we involve in everyday lives that we can observe or experience.

According to Ericson et. al (2014), their research shows that mindfulness has positive impacts on well-being and empathy; it can also promote an individual’s awareness on ‘true’ values. Besides that, a lot of researches proved that mindfulness enable the improvement of happiness; well-being and health related conditions as it could involve ability of individual to focus on present moment rather than unhappiness. An argument stated by Ericson et. al (2014) that mindfulness able to indicate one’s values clearly as it helps to reflect more objectively in order to allow us to “rediscover and choose values that maybe truer for us” (see also Shapiro et. al 2006). A measurement has been did and completed by researchers and they found that the high mindfulness was associated with smaller financial desire discrepancies and greater subjective well-being. At the same time, training was given to participants in mindfulness and they found that, when training increased mindfulness, financial desire discrepancies decreased and subjective well-being increased. Mindfulness also increases compassion and empathy as they are main criteria of many religious and belief system, in other word, can help in improving social relations to felt connected with other people and outside the world. However, researchers state that emotional and cognitive habits able to reduce by mindfulness and the increasing of the individual awareness of their mental life. Bishop et. al (2004) said “ Rather than observing experience through the filter of our beliefs, assumptions, expectations and desires, mindfulness involves a direct observation of various objects as if for the first time,…”(Ericson et. al 2014).

Few weeks ago, I watched a video that is regarding to the culture between Japan and China. In the video, there are 2 tourists from China travel in Japan. The video shows that the 2 tourists are visiting the market in Japan. When the 2 China tourists stop in front of a food stall, they pick up the food their selves without inform the stall owner. After they took and gave the food they choose to the stall owner to remove the packaging of the food, they took another one and just put into mouth before paid. Then they refuse to pay for the food which its packaging has been removed. In Japan, usually the consumers should eat the food they bought in the stall where they bought. But the Chinese visit to the next stall at the same time eats the food they bought from the stall just now. This caused those Japanese unacceptable. Besides that, the video captured that the Chinese consume outside food in the Japanese food store as there is not allowed to consume outside food if the food is not bought within the store. The Chinese took out a yogurt drink from their bag and they just open it and drink. The Japanese storekeeper felt so helpless when saw such a situation happened in her store. Then the Chinese just leave the store like that.

As the situation above, this indicates that the Japanese unable to accept the Chinese behavior and at the same time, the Chinese did not realize that what they did have already offended those Japanese as they can’t adapt to people culture. In my opinion, yes, everyone should respect each other of culture, but respect doesn’t mean to accept the culture other than theirs. As what I watched and get from the video, the Chinese not understand the habits and the culture in the Japanese when they were travelling there; At the same time, those Japanese especially the stall owner as well as the storekeeper, they do not understand why the Chinese behave as out of their expectation but not like those people in Japanese. Thus, conflict might be happened between them due to the lack of understanding of each other cultures.