Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (12 page)

Hannah was not trying to gain control over the “weather.” Rather, she was becoming more interested in it, observing storms and the ensuing periods of tranquility with curiosity, but without self-criticism. She was slowly becoming aware of her thoughts
as thoughts
and the inner workings of her mind as passing mental events.

Seeing her mind as a lake, Hannah saw how often it had become disturbed by a passing storm. “Then,” she said, “the water becomes murky and full of sediment. But if I am patient, I can see the weather changing. I can see the lake in all its beauty gradually becoming clear again. Not that this solves all my problems. I can still feel discouraged sometimes. But it helps if I
see it as a process that I repeat time after time. I can see the point of practicing every day.”

Hannah was discovering something profound: that none of us can control what thoughts rampage through our minds, or the “weather” they can create. But we
do
have some control over how we relate to it.

As you practice day by day, see if your experiences are similar or different to Hannah’s. You may discover that it’s very easy to become distracted. Our minds tend to flit from thought to thought, so it can be very difficult to maintain concentration. This simple realization is a crucial step along the road to cultivating mindful awareness.

See if it is possible for you to be kind to yourself. When you practice, and your mind wanders, you may discover something of profound importance. You begin to “see” your thought stream in action. Like any stream, you will start to see all its bubblings and gurglings. For the briefest of moments, all of the thoughts, feelings and memories that flow incessantly across your mind will become apparent. Many of them will seem utterly random. It’s almost as if your mind is digging around in the back room, offering up possibilities to gauge if
you—
your conscious awareness—like them or find them useful or interesting in some way. It’s like a child holding up its toys to an approving adult. This is what your mind does—it offers up possibilities. You can then choose whether to accept these thoughts or not. But all too often we forget this. We confuse the mind’s thoughts with reality and we identify ourselves far too closely with our minds.

After a moment or two of clear awareness, you may find that you’ve slipped back into the stream and become indistinguishable from it yet again. When this happens, the task is the same: just notice your thoughts as thoughts, and gently bring your awareness back to the breath, noticing any resistance to letting go, or a continuing wish to engage with them. You might like to acknowledge them by silently granting them names—”Ah, here’s thinking,” “here’s planning” or “here’s worrying’—before returning your awareness back to the breath. You have not failed. On the contrary—you’ve taken the first step back to full awareness.

Over the next week, we’d also like you to carry out a Habit Releaser. This is designed to help you start the process of loosening up your habits by adding a little randomness to your life.

This week, see if you can notice which chairs you normally sit on at home, in a café or bar or at work (during meetings, for example). Make a deliberate choice to try another chair, or alter the position of the chair you use. It is extraordinary how much we are creatures of habit, and how we take comfort from such sameness. There is nothing wrong with this at all, but it can feed a sense of “taking things for granted” that allows the automatic pilot to thrive. You can easily stop noticing the sights, sounds, smells of everything around you, and even the feel of a chair supporting you can become
over-familiar. Notice how your perspective can change just by changing chairs.

“I
used to call my job the silent killer,” says Jason. “Being a driving instructor is probably the most stressful job in the world. Student drivers only seem to come in two types: those who think they’re Formula One race car drivers or those who are timid little rabbits who are petrified of other cars and fearful of holding up other people. Neither is in control of the car and both can be disastrous on the road. I used to spend six to eight hours a day terrified that the student would lose control and wreck my car or kill us both.

“After seven years on the job I was diagnosed with a heart murmur. It was hardly surprising really. I’d spend the entire day trying to bottle up my terror and anger. I’d become hyperactive and sweat like a pig. I’d often sleep only fitfully at night and be exhausted the next day. Life was becoming awful.”

If you watched Jason at work, you’d instantly see the distress painted across his face and understand why his life had become so unpleasant. His body was often rigid with tension, his
movements were jerky and the furrows in his brow were a permanent fixture. He had become the very picture of misery and distress. In countless ways, he was trapped inside a vicious circle that was slowly eating away at his life.

Although he didn’t know it, Jason was being driven as much by the fears and tensions locked into his body as by the thoughts and feelings in his mind. For as we saw earlier, thoughts, feelings and emotions can often be as much a product of the body as of the mind.

The body is acutely sensitive to even the tiniest flickerings of emotion that move constantly across the mind. The body often detects our thoughts almost before we’ve consciously registered them ourselves and frequently reacts as if they are solid and real, whether they
accurately
reflect the world or not. But the body does not just react to what the mind is thinking—it also feeds back emotional information into the brain that can then end up enhancing fears, worries and general overall angst and unhappiness. This feedback loop is a dance of phenomenal power and complexity that is only now beginning to be understood.

Many experiments show just how powerfully your body influences your thoughts—and your gestures and posture can affect even your most seemingly logical judgments too. In 1980, psychologists Gary Wells and Richard Petty conducted a groundbreaking (and oft repeated) experiment to show the impact of the body on the mind. Participants were asked to test some stereo headphones by rating the sound quality after they had listened to some music and a speech played over them. To simulate running, they were asked to move their heads while listening. Some volunteers were asked to move their heads from side to side, almost as if they were shaking their
heads, some moved their heads up and down in a nodding sort of way and others were told not to move at all. You can probably guess which group rated the headphones most highly: the nodders, whose head movements suggested “yes,” rated them higher than the group whose shaking heads suggested “no.”

And if this wasn’t suggestive and intriguing enough, the experimenters played a final trick on their human guinea pigs. As they were leaving the building, they were asked if they’d like to take part in a brief survey about college life. None of them knew that this was also part of the same experiment. Despite this, people’s opinions were affected not only by what they had heard over the headphones, but also by their head movements. The voice they heard over the headphones had been discussing whether tuition fees should rise from $587 to $750. Strikingly, those who had kept their heads still, when asked afterwards what they thought the fees should be, gave an average recommendation of $582—close to the actual fee. The average fee suggested by those who had been shaking their heads was much lower at $467. And the nodders? Well, they believed that the fees should be increased to $646.
¹
And none of them was aware that the movement of their heads had affected their judgment in any way.

It’s clear—far more so than any of us would like to admit—that the judgments we make from moment to moment can be significantly affected by the state of our bodies at the time that we make them. For some, this will make disturbing reading, but it’s also heartening because it
means that simply altering your relationship to your body can profoundly improve your life. But there’s just one catch: most of us are barely aware of our bodies
at all. It’s almost as if we’re flying blind through huge parts of our lives.

We can easily spend so much time “in our head” that we almost forget we have a body at all. We can spend ages planning, remembering, analyzing, judging, brooding and comparing. None of these things is “wrong” in itself, but they can easily end up undermining our physical and mental well-being. We forget about our bodies and their influence on how we think, feel and behave and don’t notice, as T. S. Eliot put it, our “strained time-ridden faces, distracted from distraction by distraction.”
²

This tendency to ignore the body can be reinforced by a sense that many of us have; that we do not like ours very much—they might not be as tall or as thin or as attractive as we’d like. Or perhaps they don’t work as well as they used to. And, for some of us, there is a whisper at the back of our minds that one day they will let us down catastrophically; there will come a time when our bod
ies will grow old and die, whether we’re ready for it or not.

This can mean we end up ignoring or mistreating our bodies. We might not treat them as enemies, but we certainly don’t care for them as we would a friend. The body becomes something of a stranger. We tune out the messages it sends to us, creating more distress than we could ever imagine. For if mind and body are one, then to treat the body as somehow separate from us is to perpetuate a profound sense of dislocation, right at the heart of our being. If there is one thing that we need to learn in order to bring peace and “ease of being” into our lives in the midst of a frantic world, it is how to “come home” to this part of ourselves that we have ignored for too long.

To cultivate mindfulness truly, we need to become fully integrated with our body once more.

This is something that Jason, the driving instructor, learned: “I knew that I had to find a way of staying calm through the day and relaxing at the end of it. I tried various sports but none really grabbed me. I tried yoga and knew that the exercises and the mindfulness meditations at the end were just what I needed. I realized that I was completely disconnected from my body. I could barely sense it at all.

“It took a few weeks for me to feel the full effects, but gradually, inch by inch, I started to regain some control over my life. It’s given me renewed perspective, which is incredibly useful in my job. I can now anticipate my students’ mistakes a few moments before they happen. I’ve also gained a surprising amount of empathy, which helps me to deal more effectively with their fears and worries.

“Last week, one of my pupils reversed into a post. A year ago, I would have gone ballistic, but this time, I breathed deeply a few times and said to myself,
That’s why I have insurance
.”

The first week of the mindfulness program (Chapter Five) began the process of building a capacity for sustained mindful concentration and awareness. It may have given you a glimpse into the mind’s inner workings and its tendency to “chatter.” Gradually, moment by moment, you may have come to realize that although you can’t stop the unsettling
thoughts from arising in your mind, you
can
stop what happens next. You can stop the vicious circle from feeding off itself.

The next step is to deepen your capacity to see the mind’s reactivity by learning to pay mindful attention to the body. Here, you can feel the first stirrings of emotionally charged thoughts. Instead of your body acting as an amplifier, it can become a sensitive emotional radar; an early warning system that alerts you to unhappiness, anxiety and stress almost before they arise. But if you are to learn to “read” and understand the messages from your body, you first have to learn how to pay attention, in detail, to those parts of the body that are the source of the signals. So which parts of the body are these? As you will soon discover, these signals can arise
anywhere
in the body. This means you need to use a meditation practice that includes every region of the body, ignoring nothing, befriending everything. And for this, we use the Body Scan.
³

The Body Scan meditation is beautifully simple and reintegrates your mind and body into a powerful and seamless whole. It does so by inviting you to move your attention around the body, holding each region center-stage in nonjudgmental awareness for a while, before disengaging that attention and
shifting the spotlight on to the next region, until you’ve “scanned” the whole body. As you do this, you are developing your capacity to pay sustained attention. You are also discovering a special flavor of awareness—one that’s characterized by a sense of gentleness and curiosity.