Paris (AFP)

"There is nothing to do, you just have to be." In this era of global confinement, this thought did a lot of good for Julie Arrue during her online meditation course, a discipline that many of them practice to get through the crisis.

The figures displayed by online meditation applications speak for themselves: one of the leaders in France, Petit Bambou, has grown "from 5,000 to 15,000 users per day since the start of confinement" and has exceeded five million registered in France and the million in Spain, according to its co-founder Benjamin Blasco at AFP.

Without authorized outings, opportunities to relax are limited and "yoga, fitness is also increasing" online, notes Julien Delon, co-founder of Mind, whose daily downloads have tripled, from 500 to 1,500 per day.

But meditation "is particularly suited to the current situation, creating stress," he believes.

The pandemic, the confinement and the economic crisis which threatens generate "multiple emotions: stress, anxiety, fear, anger, and tension between people because of the promiscuity", recalls Benjamin Blasco.

These applications offer in particular an initiation to "mindfulness", a meditation practice popularized in the 1980s by the American biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn. His stress reduction technique (MBSR), which came from Buddhism but which has lost its religious connotation, has been the subject of several scientific studies which have demonstrated certain benefits.

- "Peasant agriculture" -

The Harvard medical school concluded for example in 2011 that this type of meditation, based on attention to breathing and the body, allows a better concentration of gray matter in the brain areas related to learning, memory and empathy.

Mr. Kabat-Zinn has offered meditation sessions himself since the start of confinement on the Wisdom 2.0 site. Thousands of practitioners - regulars and beginners - follow it daily, connected from home.

In recent years, "mindfulness" has spread to "the general public, in health care, in schools, and even in the political sphere", explains Dominique Retoux, professor of this practice in Paris.

LREM deputy Gaël Le Bohec recently proposed to his colleagues of all stripes to indulge in it to calm the nerves "put to the test" by the coronavirus and the "confinement".

Meditation is an "antidote to the frenzy of the modern world", and now that "nature has stopped us", it has even more resonance, says Dominique Retoux.

While warning those who expect "miracle results" too quickly: "It is not intensive farming, it is peasant farming, every day we work our land".

- Free for caregivers -

"It's a meeting to get out of the mental and emotional runaway," says Julie Arrue, a film producer who follows sessions offered online by Mr. Retoux and his colleague Inken Dechow, forced to close their room in Paris.

"For me meditation was for Buddhist monks, but I discovered that everyone can do it, it's accessible," says another practitioner, Louisa Renon, confined with her two teenagers in the Paris suburbs.

In support of caregivers, on the front line against the coronavirus, Petit Bambou and Mind offered them free "premium" access.

"We distributed between 2,500 and 3,000 codes to the thirty hospitals that contacted us, including from Belgium and Luxembourg. This shows a huge need," explains the co-founder of Petit Bambou.

Mind counts around 2,000 caregivers among its users.

Will these new practitioners remain so after the crisis? "The media talk about it a lot, it seems to be a fashionable thing, but it's a fashion that has lasted for 40 years (in the West), 2,500 years in certain cultures," argues Dominique Retoux.

© 2020 AFP