Adaptation, habit, learning, plasticity allow us to reinvent ourselves for survival, whether biological or intellectual in a broad sense (I mean the ability to make thoughts, points of view or decisions flexible when we seek agreement with other people).

We can see the adaptation in how we get used to the weight of clothes on our bodies, in the way we incorporate new cultures or routines. These are changes that can occur unconsciously or consciously; sometimes to keep up with the times, and other times to achieve what we want to do or become who we want to be.

First you learn, then you repeat and it becomes a habit. By sustaining it over time, that profound change occurs: plasticity, transformation. Once something has been learned, it is available as a resource, ready to be activated when we need it. Think, for example, of the ability to concentrate.

Some tasks require very little attention, but others require 100%. If we don't invest that energy, we may not achieve the expected result, or it may take much longer to achieve it and we will spend more resources than necessary.

Habit and learning also apply to concentration. We can learn to focus the mind when we want and to abstract ourselves from what is happening around us, to generate a state of full concentration.

You can start training your concentration without it being useful at that moment. Like a game. Choose a time of day, it can be at your work desk, and fix your gaze on a point in front of you — an image, a mark on the wall or some object on the table. If you see that you are dispersing, change the object on which you are focusing. Sustain the exercise for a couple of minutes. You will notice how the environment begins to blur. Once that capacity for abstraction is trained, it is time to sustain attention on the chosen point.

In this way we train the mind and thought. And when the time comes to need more attention and concentration, the habit will already be in you: your head will know what you are proposing and will play along ;)

Training meditation is, to a large extent, training concentration. A simple meditation exercise is to imagine a geometric figure and try to keep that image present without getting distracted.

In very brief moments we will inevitably get distracted. The distractions that arise will be of one of these three types: physical, emotional, or mental.

A physical distraction can be, for example, that the knees start to hurt, the back gets tired, or the neck bothers us. Physical sensations that take the focus of attention that we were trying to maintain on a certain thought and bring it towards the body.

An emotional distraction is a little more subtle. For example, we may feel anxiety or boredom. Perhaps a feeling of sadness surfaces. Or if we had a bad day and we are in a bad mood, it becomes difficult to direct attention towards the object of concentration.

Mental distractions are thoughts. We remember something, we start thinking about something else. We make associations. We direct attention to memories of the past or projections of the future.

To reduce these distractions and advance in meditation training, all these aspects (physical, emotional and mental) have to be worked on. Performing a comprehensive work of the individual is crucial if we want to obtain true results with this technique.