Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (15 page)

The boy did as his grandfather had bade him, and after a few moments, the donkey started to walk forward. The boy giggled with delight, and the traveler watched as animal and boy trotted off happily, side by side, down the track and round the far bend.

How often in your life have you behaved like the small boy tugging on the donkey’s bridle? When things aren’t working out as we’d like them to, it’s tempting to try a little harder, to keep pushing and pulling in the direction we want to go. But is it always sensible to keep relentlessly pushing in one direction? Or should we follow the advice of the old man in the story and pause, simply waiting for things to pan out as they will, spotting opportunities as they arise?

For most of us, this attitude is almost a cardinal sin because it suggests passivity—and yet, often as not, it might be the best course of action. Pushing too hard at a problem, at a stubborn donkey, might just make things far worse. It can close down the mind and prevent us from thinking creatively, instead driving us round in ever decreasing and exhausting circles. Clear creative awareness thrives more readily in a mind that is open and playful.

In an experiment done by psychologists at the University of
Maryland and published in 2001,
²
a group of students were asked to play a simple game where they had to solve a maze puzzle. You’ll probably recall these from your childhood; the idea is to draw a line with a pencil from the middle of the maze to the exit without taking the pencil off the page. Two groups of students were asked to solve the puzzles in which the goal was to help a cartoon mouse get safely to its mouse hole. But there was a twist. One group of students was working on a version of the maze that had a piece of delicious-looking che
ese in front of the mouse hole near the exit of the maze. In technical parlance, this is known as a positive, or approach-orientated, puzzle. On the other group’s version there was no cheese, but instead a picture of an owl that was poised to swoop and capture the mouse in its claws at any moment. This is known as a negative, or avoidance-orientated, puzzle.

The mazes were simple to do and all of the students completed them in around two minutes. But the aftereffects of the puzzles on the students were poles apart. For after completing the maze, all the students were asked to do a different, apparently unrelated test that measured creativity. When they did these, those who’d avoided the owl did 50 percent
worse
than those who’d helped the mouse find the cheese. It turned out that avoidance “closed down” options in the students’ minds. It triggered their minds’ “aversion” pathways, leaving them with a lingering sense of fear and an enhanced sense of vigilance and caution. This state of mind both weakened their creativity and reduced their flexibility.

This outlook couldn’t have been more different from that of those students who’d helped the mouse find the cheese. They became open to new experiences, were more playful and carefree,
less cautious and were happy to experiment. In short, the experience opened their minds. This experiment and others like it show that:

The spirit in which you do something is often as important as the act itself.

Think about the significance of this for a moment. If you do something in a negative or critical way, if you overthink or worry or carry out a task through gritted teeth, then you will activate your mind’s aversion system. This will narrow the focus of your life. You will become like a mouse with an owl complex: more anxious, less flexible, less creative. If, however, you do exactly the same thing in an open-hearted, welcoming manner, you thereby activate the mind’s “approach” system: your life has a chance to become richer, warmer, more flexible and more creative.

And nothing activates the mind’s avoidance system (and depresses the approach system) quite like the feeling of being
trapped
. This sense of being trapped is also central to extreme feelings of exhaustion and helplessness. Many people who work too hard, or for too long, end up being trapped by their own perfectionism and sense of responsibility—they feel, deep down, that there is “no escape.” It might be that, some time in the past, they had to prove something to themselves or to others because they felt bullied into it at home or at school, but over the years this has turned into a script that keeps them locked into old habits. This bullying script may once have helped them get what they wanted in life, but now it simply exhausts them. In this way, it’s all too easy to cede all the power to the
“self-attacking” aspect of yourself, and over time, you can come to feel, deep down, that the only possible response is to submit to the pressure. Trapped, your world seems to present fewer and fewer alternatives for action, whatever the reality. The result is long-term “demobilization.” Your playfulness becomes paved over with concrete.

Feelings of exhaustion ensure that you stop taking risks—you want to hide away in the corner, you want the world to go away and leave you alone, or at least stop noticing you. These behavior patterns are common to all animals, not just humans, but they can inflict an intolerable psychological burden on people. They drive depression, chronic stress and exhaustion, especially in those who are conscientious. And if the very effort of trying to free yourself from these patterns backfires, leading to ever greater anxiety, stress and fatigue, this then brings its own sense of defeat—a sense of being trapped in your own burnout, and your malaise is soon all-pervading.

Although these negative spirals are incredibly powerful, you can begin to dissipate them just by becoming aware of them. The simple act of turning toward and observing them helps to dissolve such patterns because they are maintained by the mind’s Doing mode (which has volunteered to help, even though it’s precisely the wrong tool for the job). The Doing mode entangles you even more in your own
ideas
of freedom, adding a sense of deep aversion and the demand that things should be different from how they are. So you become caught in a
fantasy
of freedom and miss the
actuality
of freedom available to you.

Week Three of the Mindfulness program brings
true
freedom a step closer by further enhancing your awareness of the body and mind.

By now you may have begun to realize the power of mindfulness for enhancing your life. Many of the changes will be quite subtle. You might have started to sleep better and begun to feel a little more energized the next day. You might be slower to anger and quicker to laugh. The momentum behind your negative thoughts might have begun to lessen. You might also have begun to notice such unexpected joys as the delicate beauty of the flowers in the park, or the way that birds sing to each other through the treetops. Other benefits might have crept up on you and only revealed themselves at unexpected times.

Freddy discovered this. He told us, “I’ve just filed my tax return. It was an unusually untraumatic experience. Normally, I climb the walls with stress and anger, as it’s just about the most awful day of the year. This year, I did what was required in about half the normal time. I then went for a drink with a friend and it suddenly dawned on me that I wasn’t stressed at all. That was odd and a blessed relief. I’m sure it’s down to my daily practice.”

Mindfulness
is about reorienting your life, so you can enjoy it to the full. This does not mean that tiredness and suffering disappear. You will feel periods of sadness too. But there is a greater chance that when it comes, it arises as an empathic sadness, not as a corrosive emotion tinged with bitterness and anger that so many associate with unhappiness. So when you see people stuck in traffic with their stressed and angry faces, you might feel a little sad for them. When you look into the worried faces on the bus, or at work, you might share a little of their pain. This is normal. For some people, this sharing of other people’s emotional burdens can be a bit tough. It might even be
overpowering at times, particularly if you’ve spent decades suppressing your own emotions.

Opening yourself up to empathy is important because out of this sad-sweet emotion will arise compassion for yourself and for others. Compassion—particularly for yourself—is of overwhelming importance. It takes the fuel away from your endless, driving self-criticism. You will eventually be able to see more clearly that some things in life are less important than you had thought, and find it easier to let go of over-caring about them. You will find that the energy that they have been consuming can be used to treat yourself and the world more generously.

Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple and a keen meditator, learned this after a brush with cancer: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—all these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
³

How can you build these insights into your daily life? The previous two weeks of formal meditations have introduced ways in which you can stabilize the mind and focus your attention. They, together with the informal practice of waking up to routine activities, have been laying the groundwork foreveryday mindfuln
ess—the type of awareness that tiptoes into your daily life and helps you become fully conscious of the world as it is, rather than how you wish it could be. We have begun the process of revealing how the mind works and raised the possibility
that your thoughts are not you. This, in itself, can be phenomenally liberating. It helps you shake off some of the toxic thinking habits that periodically seize control of the mind when you are stressed and exhausted and sap your enthusiasm for living.

Week Three takes this enhanced awareness and begins to weave it even more closely into daily life. It uses three short meditations that we suggest you use six days out of the next seven (see box, below).

Movement can have as profound and soothing an impact on the mind as the Body Scan. In its purest form, this is simply a meditation that involves anchoring awareness in the moving body. It provides an extended laboratory (or playground) to explore your mind in all its intricacies.

The Mindful Movement meditation (see box on page
120
) consists of four interlinked stretching exercises that are carried out over a few minutes. These physically realign many of the body’s
muscles and joints, releasing the stresses that build up in daily
life
. You will find it most helpful to carry out the exercises while listening to the audio online (track
3
) as they involve quite precise movements. However, we also give detailed instructions on p.
120
, so that you have a solid understanding of what’s required. You should aim to do the practice on six out of the next seven days, and move seamlessly from the Mindful Movement meditation on to the Breath and Body meditation (p.
127
and track
4
at
http://bit.ly/rodalemindfulness
).

It is natural to feel a bit clunky and uncomfortable when you put time aside to move in this slow way. See if you can explore these sensations, but it is important to be gentle with yourself as you do so. We can’t stress enough that the intention here is not to feel pain, or to push beyond the limits of your body. You need to look after yourself during these stretches, letting the wisdom of your body decide what is OK for you: how far to go with any stretch and for how long to hold it.

In particular, if you have a physical problem with your back or any other part of the body, do consult your physician or physical therapist before embarking on even these simple stretches. If you have known physical problems, then as soon as you feel mild discomfort, you should “check in” with yourself. See if you are becoming inclined to push yourself too much. Instead, you could try holding the position for as long as it seems OK to do so, then back off a little. Moment by moment, make wise choices about whether to hold any position for a little longer to explore the sensations or to let go of this posture and move on. You may discover that the sense of solid discomfort comes and goes with the ebb and flow of sensations. Mindful Movement is about cultivating awareness as you do this practice. It is not a competition with yourself or anyone else.