Mindfulness is structured around the fact that we are only alive in the present moment. The future isn’t here yet, so all we can do is imagine, hope, or worry about it. The past, meanwhile has already gone, so what we do with our mind is remember, reflect and often ruminate about what has already happened.

So where does your heritage come into this philosophy? We have an unbreakable bond with our family and our ancestors. When you stop to think about it, all you are is an aggregate of genes and life experiences. The genes you received from your parents affect you enormously, even if you happened to be adopted at birth so never had experiences living with your parents. Still, their genes help to shape who you are and who you will continue to become, because “who you are” doesn’t stop changing and evolving through your life.

On top of this, every experience you had with your parents, siblings, grandparents, cousins and so on also had and still has an impact on who you are and how you behave and react in everyday life.

So there’s no getting away from family. The question, from my perspective, is, what we can and should do about this profound, deeply personal part of our life.

I tend to use it to nurture two healthy mental qualities, and also, therefore, combat two unpleasant mental states that can otherwise unwittingly grow in our minds. The two positive qualities are gratitude and compassion, and the negative opposites are taking things for granted and indifference to the suffering of others.

In a very bitter ironic twist I am lucky to have much in my Polish ancestry to use to nurture both gratitude and compassion. Compared with how their lives went, mine is so easy, so fortunate, so safe.

There’s not the space to go through all the details so here’s just some of it. My grandmother died of starvation and exhaustion. My father and his sisters were deported to the labour camps of the Soviet Union. My dad had typhus, dysentery twice, and malaria all in a single year. My aunt weighed three stone, twelve pounds at the age of fifteen. My grandfather died of cancer while serving in the Polish underground army, bereft of his wife and children for the last four years of his life. Five of his seven siblings died in infancy. His parents and his Stepek grandparents never made it past forty years old, all falling to tuberculosis. One of my father’s cousins was captured by the Soviets and was murdered with a bullet to the back of his head in a basement cell. He was 21 years old. His brother is still alive, still mourning. Another of my father’s cousins died of typhus in Kazakhstan.

That’s the bare bones. I’ve left out the other family members who were taken to Soviet labour camps or the dreaded Nazi concentration camps in Germany. And I’ve left out the lifelong chasm all these events caused between the broken family members, and between the large number who found themselves in exile from their homelands for the rest of their lives.

How do we begin to imagine what those poor people went through?

We can’t. But we can feel. We can feel compassion and love for them just through a little mindful attention on the enormity of their suffering. Just paying attention to the magnitude of their life experiences can open up in us these necessary and healthy sensations.

However, it is important not to allow such powerful emotions to turn negative, into anger, pessimism, or despair. So we need to have mental discipline to keep the emotions healthy and directed towards our empathy for those who suffered, not the people who caused their pain. How to deal with that is for another time, not now. Right now we are deliberately nurturing love and compassion.

We can then let this compassion spread outwards to others who suffer, especially those who are suffering right now in our own time. This not only increases our capacity for compassion but prevent the otherwise natural mental tendency to become more self-centred and tribal in our thinking about others.

And then to gratitude. I do a little practice when I drink cool water, in addition to noticing the beauty of the coolness, the freshness of the water, the lubricating and cooling effect it has on my mouth. I think of my grandmother and my father and my aunts shrivelling from lack of water, their mouths parched, fearing death. And I deliberately bring to mind pure undiluted gratitude for living in such a special place that has water running almost freely to all of our homes and workplaces, pure and clean and life-sustaining. Also that I live in a place where I am relatively speaking free from fear, safe, secure, unlike many of my direct ancestors.

If you are truly mindful of your current situation, unless you are in exceptionally unusual difficult circumstances, you can start to see just how privileged and fortunate we are to live as we do today. In all of human history people had no guarantee until recently that the precious life-sustaining water we all need would be safe to drink. Homes were not centrally heated, roads were mud-strewn, car and planes did not exist.

Let your mind settle from time to time, and allow these insights of compassion and gratitude to arise and grow in you when we you think of your family history.