Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (8 page)

Mindfulness has
been found to boost resilience—that is, the ability to withstand life’s knocks and setbacks—to quite a remarkable degree. Hardiness varies hugely from person to person. Some people thrive on stressful challenges that may daunt many others, whether these involve meeting ever increasing work performance targets, trekking to the South Pole or being able to cope with three kids, a stressful job and mortgage payments.

What is it that makes “hardy” people able to cope where others might wilt? Dr. Suzanne Kobasa at City University of New York narrowed the field down to three psychological traits that she termed
control, commitment
and
challenge
. Another eminent psychologist, Dr. Aaron Antonovsky, an Israeli medical sociologist, has also attempted to pin down the key psychological traits that allowed some to withstand extreme stress while others did not. He focused on Holocaust survivors and narrowed the search down to three traits that together add to having a
sense of coherence
:
comprehensibility, manageability
and
meaningfulness.
So “hardy” people have a belief that their situation has inherent
meaning
that they can commit themselves to, that they can
manage
their life and that their situation is
understandable
—that it is basically comprehensible, even if it seems chaotic and out of control.

To a large degree, all of the traits identified by both Kobasa and Antonovsky govern how resilient we are. Generally speaking, the higher you score on their scales the more able you are to cope with life’s trials and tribulations.

As part of their ongoing evaluation of the impact of their eight-week mindfulness training course, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s team
at the University of Massachusetts Medical School decided to see whether meditation could boost these scores and thereby enhance hardiness. And the results were very clear cut. In general, not only did the participants feel happier, more energized and less stressed, they also felt that they had far more control over their lives. They found that their lives had more meaning and that challenges should be seen as opportunities rather than threats. Other studies have replicated this finding.
²⁰

But perhaps most intriguing of all is the realization that these “fundamental” character traits are not unchangeable after all. They can be changed for the better by just eight weeks of mindfulness training. And these transformations should not be underestimated because they can have huge significance for our day-to-day lives. While empathy, compassion and
inner serenity are vital for overall well-being, a certain degree of hardiness is required too. And the cultivation of mindfulness can have a dramatic impact on these crucial aspects of our lives.

These hard-won findings of research from laboratories and clinics all over the world have profound implications. They are changing the way scientists think about the mind and allow us to have confidence in the experiences of the countless thousands of people who have discovered the benefits of mindfulness for themselves. Again and again, people tell us that mindful awareness greatly enhances the joys of daily life. In practice, even the smallest of things can suddenly become captivating again. For this reason, one of our favorite practices is the Chocolate meditation (see the opposite page). In this you are asked to attend actively to some chocolate as you eat it. Why not do this one right now, before you start the main eight-week program? You’ll be astonished at what you discover.

Choose some chocolate—either a type that you’ve never tried before or one that you have not eaten recently. It might be dark and flavorsome, organic or fair-trade or whatever you choose. The important thing is to choose a type you wouldn’t normally eat or that you consume only rarely. Here goes:

 

• Open the packet. Inhale the aroma. Let it sweep over you.
  
 

 

• Break off a piece and look at it. Really let your eyes drink in what it looks like, examining every nook and cranny.
  
 

 

• Pop it in your mouth. See if it’s possible to hold it on your tongue and let it melt, noticing any tendency to suck at it. Chocolate has over three hundred different flavors. See if you can sense some of them.
  
 

 

• If you notice your mind wandering while you do this, simply notice where it went, then gently escort it back to the present moment.
  
 

 

• After the chocolate has completely melted, swallow it very slowly and deliberately. Let it trickle down your throat.
  
 

 

• Repeat this with the next piece.
  
 

How do you feel? Is it different from normal? Did the chocolate taste better than if you’d just eaten it at a normal breakneck pace?

T
he remaining chapters of this book show you how to gradually settle your mind and enhance your natural happiness and contentment using mindfulness meditation. It will take you along a path that countless philosophers and practitioners have trodden in the past; a path that the latest scientific advances show really does dissipate anxiety, stress, unhappiness and feelings of exhaustion.

Each of the remaining eight chapters has two elements: the first is a meditation (or series of shorter meditations) that you will be asked to do for a total of around twenty to thirty minutes per day, using the audio files found at
http://bit.ly/rodalemindfulness
; the second is a
“
Habit Releaser,” which gently breaks down ingrained habits. These Habit Releasers are designed to reignite your innate curiosity and are generally fun to do. They include such things as going to the movies and choosing a film at random or changing the chair you normally sit on at meetings. You’ll be asked to do
these tasks mindfully, with your full attention. This may sound frivolous, but these things can be very effective at breaking down the habits that can trap you in negative ways of thinking. Habit Releasers snap you out of a rut and can give you new avenues of life to explore. You’ll be asked to carry out one each week.

Each meditation practice should, ideally, be carried out on six days out of seven. If, for whatever reason, you can’t manage six sessions in any given week, you can simply roll over the practice and carry it out for a further week. Alternatively, if you’ve only missed a few sessions you can move on to the next week’s practice. The choice will be left up to you. It is not essential that you carry out the course in eight weeks, but it
is
important that you complete the program if you want to gain the maximum benefit and fully taste what mindfulness might offer you.

For clarity, in each chapter we have highlighted the “practices of the week” in a separate box. This makes it easy for you to read the whole book before embarking on the eight-week program should you choose to do so. If you take this approach, it would then be best if you reread the appropriate chapter when it’s time for you to carry out the allotted meditation, so you can understand the aims and intentions of each practice.

For the first four weeks of the program, the emphasis is on learning to pay open-hearted attention to different aspects of the internal and external world. You’ll also learn how to use the “Three-Minute Breathing Space” meditation (see p.
130
) to ground yourself through the day, or whenever you feel that life is running away with you. It helps to consolidate the things that you learn during the longer formal practices. Many of those around the world who’ve completed our mindfulness courses say that it’s the most important skill they’ve ever learned for regaining control over their lives.

The remaining four weeks of the program build on this work, giving you more practical ways to see thoughts as mental events—like clouds in the sky—and helping you to cultivate an attitude of acceptance, compassion and empathy toward yourself and others. And, from this state of mind, all else follows.

During the eight weeks of the program we deliberately place each dimension of the mindful Being mode (outlined in Chapter Three) in the foreground, so that you learn progressively, at the deepest of levels, what happens when you wake up to your life. Although it seems as if each week is teaching a different aspect of mindfulness, they are, in fact, all interrelated. As we said on p.
44
, a shift in one dimension brings about a shift in the others as well. This is why you will be invited to do many different practices and to persist with each one for at least a week—for each of them provides a different gateway into awareness, and
no one can say which, for you, at this point in your life, will be most helpful in helping you reconnect with what is deepest and wisest within you.