Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (10 page)

If you are fully aware, then you maintain greater control of your automatic pilot and can use it to deploy habits as you need them. For example, come 5:30 p.m. you might engage in the “end-of-theworkday” habits, such as a final check of your emails, closing down the computer and a quick rummage through your bag to ensure that you’ve got your keys, phone and wallet or purse. At the same time, you might continue an engrossing conversation with a colleague, while thinking about what to have for dinner. But you can very easily lose conscious control of your automatic pilot. One habit can end up triggering the next, which triggers the next … and the next. For example, you might go home after work out of habit and forget to meet a friend for a drink. In so many seemingly small ways, habits can, surreptitiously, take control of your life.

As the years pass, this can become a huge problem as you cede more and more control of your life to the autopilot—including much of what you think. Habits trigger thoughts, which trigger more thoughts, which end up triggering yet more habitual thoughts. Fragments of negative thoughts and feelings can form themselves into patterns that amplify your emotions. Before you know it, you can become overwhelmed by deep-seated stresses, anxieties and sadnesses. And by the time you’ve noticed the unwanted thoughts and feelings, they’ll have become too strong to contain. A “thoughtless” comment by a friend can leave you feeling unhappy and insecure. A driver who cuts in front of you can tip you over the edge into irritability and anger. You can be left feeling exhausted, frantic and cynically disconnected from the world. Then you might feel guilty about your loss of control. Another twist of the downward spiral has begun …

You may desperately try and head off the spiral of stress by trying to suppress it. You might try arguing with yourself, telling yourself:
I’m stupid for feeling like this.
But such thinking
about thoughts, feelings and emotions simply makes them worse. Very soon the autopilot can become overloaded with too many thoughts, memories, anxieties and tasks—just like a computer with too many windows left open. Your mind slows down. You may become exhausted, anxious, frantic and chronically dissatisfied with life. And again, just like a computer, you may freeze—or even crash.

When you reach the point where such overload has seized up the conscious mind, it’s very difficult to reverse the process simply by thinking your way out, for this is like opening yet another program on the computer, overlayering it with yet another window. Instead, you need to find a way of stepping outside the cycle almost as soon as you notice it’s begun. This is the first step in learning to deal with life more skillfully. It involves training yourself to notice when your autopilot is taking over, so that you can then make a choice about what you want your mind to be focusing upon. You need to learn to close down some of the “programs” that have been left running in the background of your mind. The first stage of regaining your innate mindfulness involves returning to basics. You need to relearn how to focus your awareness on one thing at a time.

Do you remember the Chocolate meditation from Chapter Three (see p.
55
)? Now you can explore this further by doing a similar exercise in mindful eating. The Raisin meditation (opposite page) is a more subtle version of eating chocolate mindfully. You may find that paying very close attention to what you’re eating will change the experience in quite unexpected ways.

You only
need
do this practice once, but you can obviously do it as many times as you wish. It’s a sampler, as it were. After you’ve carried it out, you have started the mindfulness meditation program.

Set aside five to ten minutes when you can be alone, in a place, and at a time, when you will not be disturbed by the phone, family or friends. Switch off your cell phone, so it doesn’t play on your mind. You will need a few raisins (or other dried fruit or small nuts). You’ll also need a piece of paper and a pen to record your reactions af
terward. Your task will be to eat the fruit or nuts in a mindful way, much as you ate the chocolate earlier (see p.
55
).

Read the instructions below to get an idea of what’s required, and only reread them if you really need to. The spirit in which you do the meditation is more important than covering every instruction in minute detail. You should spend about twenty to thirty seconds on each of the following eight stages:

1. Holding

Take one of the raisins (or your choice of dried fruit or nuts) and hold it in the palm of your hand, or between your fingers and thumb. Focusing on it, approach it as if you have never seen anything like it before. Can you feel the weight of it in your hand? Is it casting a shadow on your palm?

2. Seeing

Take the time really to see the raisin. Imagine you have never seen one before. Look at it with great care and full attention. Let your eyes explore every part of it. Examine the highlights where the light shines; the darker hollows, the folds and ridges.

3. Touching

Turn the raisin over between your fingers, exploring its texture. How does it feel between the forefinger and thumb of the other hand?

4. Smelling

Now, holding it beneath your nose, see what you notice with each in-breath. Does it have a scent? Let it fill your awareness. And if there is no scent, or very little, notice this as well.

5. Placing

Slowly take the object to your mouth and notice how your hand and arm know exactly where to put it. And then gently place it in your mouth, noticing what the tongue does to “receive” it. Without chewing, simply explore the sensations of having it on your tongue. Gradually begin to explore the object with your tongue, continuing for thirty seconds or more if you choose.

6. Chewing

When you’re ready, consciously take a bite into the raisin and notice the effects on the object, and in your mouth. Notice any tastes that it releases. Feel the texture as your teeth bite into it. Continue slowly chewing it, but do not swallow it just yet. Notice what is happening in the mouth.

7. Swallowing

See if you can detect the first intention to swallow as it arises in your mind, experiencing it with full awareness before you actually swallow. Notice what the tongue does to prepare it for swallowing. See if you can follow the sensations of swallowing the raisin. If you can, consciously sense it as it moves down into your stomach. And if you don’t swallow it all at one time, consciously notice a second or even a third swallow, until it has all gone. Notice what the tongue does after you have swallowed.

8. Aftereffects

Finally, spend a few moments registering the aftermath of this eating. Is there an aftertaste? What does the absence of the raisin feel like? Is there an automatic tendency to look for another?

Now take a moment to write down anything that you noticed when you were doing the practice. Here’s what some people who’ve attended our courses said:

“The smell for me was amazing; I’d never noticed that before.”

“I felt pretty stupid, like I was in art school or something.”

“I thought how ugly they looked … small and wrinkled, but the taste was very different from what I would normally have thought it tasted like. It was quite nice actually.”

“I tasted this one raisin more than the twenty or so I usually stuff into my mouth without thinking.”

How many times in the past have you paid so much conscious attention to what you were doing? Did you notice how your experience of eating the raisin was transformed by the simple act of focusing on it? Many people say that they “got their money’s worth” out of eating for the first time in years. What normally happens to all that taste? It just disappears. Unnoticed. Raisins are so insignificant; we tend to eat them
by the handful, while doing something “more important.” And if it was only the taste we were missing, this might not matter too much. But once you see the difference that paying full attention can make to the small things in life, you start to get an inkling of the cost of inattention. Just think of all the pleasures of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching that are drifting by you unnoticed. You may well be missing vast portions of your daily life. You only ever have a moment to live,
this
moment, and yet we all tend to live in the past or
in the future. We only rarely notice what is arising in the present moment.

The Raisin meditation is the first sample of the central tenet of the mindfulness program: that is, relearning how to bring awareness to everyday activities so that you can see life as it is, unfolding moment by moment. This sounds simple, but it takes a great deal of practice. After the raisin exercise, participants in our mindfulness classes are asked to choose one activity that they normally do each day without thinking, and to see if they can bring “raisin mind” to it for the next few days. Perhaps you’d like to choose one such activity and join them in this simple but profound journey of awakening to the ordinary moments of living (see the box on pages
76–7
).

When Alex did the raisin exercise, he said that he suddenly realized just how much of his life was simply slipping by—both the good and the bad sides of life. Missing out on the good side meant that life simply wasn’t as rich as it could be. “If a raisin tasted so much better when I focused on it,” he mused, “what about everything else that I am eating and drinking?” He began to feel a little sad about all of the other opportunities to taste, see, smell, hear and touch in the world that he’d missed out on by rushing through his day—but then he stopped. Here was a choice: he could carry on rushing through his life
mindlessly
, or he could begin to practice “showing up” to his life. Many years later, he confided that eating that one raisin had changed his life and saved his marriage.