Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (9 page)

The Habit Releasers you’ll be asked to carry out each week are based on beautifully simple practices that, as their name suggests, break down the habits that can trap you in negative ways of thinking. They snap you out of your old careworn ruts and give you exciting new avenues to explore. They exploit another understanding that you’ll gain from meditation—that it’s difficult to be curious and unhappy at the same time. Reigniting your innate human curiosity is a wonderful way of dealing skillfully with the frantic world in which we so often live. You’ll soon discover that although you feel time-poor, you are actually moment-rich.

Before you embark on the mindfulness program, spend a moment considering how to prepare yourself. The best way to approach the program is to set aside an eight-week period when you can commit yourself to spending some time each day doing the meditations and other practices. Each step of the program introduces new elements to the practice, so that over the eight weeks you are able to deepen your learning day by day.

It is important to take your time with the practices, and to follow the instructions as best you can, even if it feels difficult, boring or repetitive. In much of our lives, if we do not like
something, we are tempted to rush on to something else, but this program is suggesting a different approach: to use your restless and churning mind as an opportunity to look more deeply into it, rather than as an immediate reason to conclude that the meditation is “not working.” See if it’s possible to keep in mind that the intention is not to strive for a goal. You are not even striving to relax, strange as this may sound. Relaxation, peace and contentment are the by-products of the work you are doing, not its goal.

So how can you put this time aside on a daily basis?

First, look on it as a time to
be
yourself and a time
for
yourself. You may find it difficult initially to find the time for your practice. One trick is to acknowledge that, in one sense, you do
not
have the spare time for this. You won’t
find
the time, you’ll have to
make
it. If you had a spare half hour each day, you’d have allocated it by now to other obligations. For these eight weeks, the commitment to this program may take some rearranging of your life. It can be very difficult to do this, even for two months, but it
will
need to be done or the practice will tend to get squeezed out by other, seemingly higher, priorities. You may find you have to rise a little earlier in the morning and, if you do so, you may then need to go to bed earlier, so that your practice is not done at the expense of your sleep. If you still feel that meditation will take up too much time, then try it as an experiment to see if you discover what others have reported—that it frees up more time than it uses—so that you find you are unexpectedly rewarded with
more
free time.

Secondly, we always remind those who participate in our classes that after they have settled on a time and a place for meditation, it’s important to be warm and comfortable, and to tell whoever needs to know what you are doing, so that
they
can
deal with interruptions by visitors or by the telephone. If the telephone
should
ring and no one else is there to answer it, see if it is possible to allow it to ring, or for the call to be taken by voicemail. Similar interruptions can also arise from “the inside,” with thoughts of something you need to do—thoughts that seem to compel you to act now. If this happens, see if you can experiment with letting the ideas and plans come and go in your mind, rather than reacting instantly to them.

Lastly, it is important to remember that when you practice, you do not have to find it enjoyable (although many people do find it pleasant, but not in an obvious way). Follow the practices day by day, until this becomes a routine, although what you’ll discover when you come to the practices is that they are never routine. You are only responsible for what you put into it. The outcome will be unique to you. None of us can tell in advance what there is to be discovered in the present moment, and what peace or freedom you will feel when it begins to reveal itself to you.

You’ll need an MP3 player, a room or place to sit where you will be undisturbed, a mat or a thick rug to lie on, a chair or stool or cushion for sitting, a blanket to keep you warm and a pencil or pen to keep a note of specific things from time to time.

Before you start, it’s important to know that as you move through the program there will be countless occasions when
you’ll feel like you’ve failed. Your mind will refuse to settle. It will race off like a greyhound after a hare. No matter what you try, within seconds your mind may become a cauldron of bubbling thoughts. It may feel like you are wrestling a snake. You may even want to put your head in your hands in despair at ever achieving a calm state of mind. Or you may feel sleepy, and a deep drowsiness will begin undermining your intention to stay awake. You may find yourself thinking,
Nothing is working for me
.

But these moments are not signs of failure. They are profoundly important. Like trying anything new, whether it’s learning to paint or to dance, it can be frustrating when the results do not correspond to the picture you have in your mind. In these moments, it pays to persist with commitment and kindness toward yourself. Apparent “failures” are where you will learn the most. The act of “seeing” that your mind has raced off, or that you are restless or drowsy, is a moment of great learning. You are coming to understand a profound truth: that your mind has a mind of its own and that a body has needs that many of us ignore for too long. You will gradually come to learn that your thoughts are not you—you do not have to take them so personally. You can simply watch these states of mind as they arise, stay a while, and then dissolve. It’s tremendously liberating to realize that your thoughts are not “real” or “reality.” They are simply mental events. They are not “you.”

At the very moment when you realize this, the patterns of thoughts and feelings that gripped you may suddenly lose momentum and allow the mind to settle. A deep feeling of contentment may fill your body. But very soon your mind will race off again. After a while, you will once again become aware that you are thinking, comparing, judging. You may now feel disappointed. You might think:
I thought I really had it then—now I’ve lost it …
Once again, you will realize that your mind is like the sea. It is never still. Its waves rise up and down. Your mind may then once again settle … at least for a while. Gradually, the periods of calm tranquility will lengthen and the time it takes for you to realize that your mind has raced off will shorten. Even the disappointment can be recognized as another state of mind. Here now, then gone …

… until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents, and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

W. H. Murray,
The Scottish Himalayan Expedition
, 1951

Throughout the following eight chapters, it may sometimes feel as if the essence of what we are trying to convey is shrouded in mist. You may feel that you’re not “getting it.” This is because many of the concepts and much of the wisdom to be gained from meditation is simply inexpressible in any language. You
simply have to do the practices and learn for yourself. If you do, then every now and again, you will have an “Aha” moment—a flicker of insight that is profoundly calming and enlightening. You will understand what other practitioners have been learning for thousands of years: that worries, stresses and anxieties can be held in a larger space, in which they emerge and dissolve, leaving you to rest in awareness itself—it’s a sense of being complete and whole that is independent of your preconceptions. At the end of the eight-week program, many people report knowing, deep within themselves, that this feeling of profound stillness, of being happy, content and free, is always available to them—it is only ever a breath away.

We wish you well as you start along this path.

O
ne evening, Alex trudged slowly up the stairs to his bedroom. He was still mulling over his day’s work as he undressed and put on his nightclothes. His thoughts hopped from subject to subject. Soon, they’d latched on to a job he needed to do out of town the following afternoon, before dithering over the best way to get there by car to avoid the roadwork. The car! He remembered that his car insurance was due for renewal. He’d use his credit card tomorrow. The card! Had he remembered to pay his credit-card bill? He thought so. He remembered the printed bill with items reserving hotel rooms for next July’s big event. Before he’d even realized it, he was thinking of his daughter’s upcoming wedding.

“Alex,” shouted his wife. “Are you ready yet? We’re
all
waiting and it’s time to go.”

With a start, Alex realized he’d gone upstairs to change for a party, not for bed.

Alex isn’t suffering from dementia, nor does he have a particularly poor memory. He’d simply been on “automatic pilot,” his mind having been hijacked by his current concerns. It’s a problem we’re all familiar with. Have you ever set off for a friend’s house, only to find yourself taking the road to work instead? Or started peeling potatoes, only to realize that you’d intended to cook rice this evening? Habits are frighteningly subtle, yet can be incredibly powerful. Without warning, they can seize control of your life and drive you in a direction totally different from that you’d intended. It’s almost as if the mind is in one place and the body in another.

Psychologist Daniel Simons has done many experiments that illustrate the extent to which we miss seemingly obvious things through automatically paying attention elsewhere. In one study, he set up an experiment in which an actor stopped an ordinary person in the street and asked for directions.
¹
As the person was giving the directions, two people carrying a door rudely barged between them. At the moment the person’s view was blocked by the door, the actor asking for directions was switched with another. The new actor looked totally different. His jacket was of a different style and color. He wasn’t wearing a sweater, nor did he have a crew cut. He even sounded completely different. Despite all this, only around half of the people que
stioned actually noticed the switch. This shows just how easily we can be absorbed in our busyness—and how powerful the side effects can be. It’s almost as if our minds are purged of consciousness, leaving the autopilot in full control.

Our autopilot may be inconvenient, but it’s not a mistake. Even though it can let us down at unexpected moments, it remains one of humanity’s greatest evolutionary assets. It allows us to sidestep temporarily a shortcoming that all animals share—namely, that we can only truly concentrate on one thing at a time or, at best, pay intermittent attention to a small number of things. Our minds have a bottleneck in the so-called “working memory” that allows us to keep only a few simple things in them at any one time. That’s one of the reasons why telephone numbers traditionally had only seven digits (plus the area code). As soon as you exceed this threshold, items tend to be forgotten. One thought seems to drive out another.

If there’s too much information sloshing around in the mind, your working memory begins to overflow. You begin to feel stressed. Life starts to trickle through your fingers. You begin to feel powerless and your mind starts periodically “freezing,” making you indecisive and increasingly unaware of what’s going on around you. You become forgetful, exhausted and at your wits’ end. It’s similar to the way a computer gets slower and slower as you open more and more windows. At first, you don’t notice the impact but, gradually, once you cross an invisible threshold, the computer becomes ever more sluggish, until it freezes—before finally crashing.

In the short term, the automatic pilot allows us to extend the working memory by creating habits. If we repeat something more than a couple of times, the mind links together all of the actions needed to complete a task in a brilliantly seamless manner. Many of the tasks we carry out each day are phenomenally complex, requiring the coordination of dozens of muscles and the firing of thousands of nerves. But they can all be linked together using a habit that consumes only a small part of your
brainpower (and an even smaller proportion of your awareness). The brain can daisy-chain such habits together to carry out long, complex tasks with very little input from the conscious mind at all. For example, if you learned to drive in a car with manual gears, you probably found it very difficult to change gears at first, but now you can do it without thinking. As your driving abilities grew, you learned to carry out simultaneously many of the tricky tasks that you now take for granted. So you can now effortlessly change gears and hold a conversation at the same time. All are daisy chained habits coordinated by your autopilot.