Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (23 page)

The Exploring Difficulty meditation often takes people by surprise. One such situation is when nothing appears to happen. Harry found that when he brought a difficult work situation to mind, he felt nothing at all: “I wondered whether I was doing it right,” he said. “Then, suddenly, I felt a contraction right across my chest. It wasn’t painful, but it was very definite. It took me by surprise—I’d never really paid attention to what my body does when I’m worried. I didn’t try to push it away. I was quite intrigued by it, actually—perhaps because it took time to feel anything. It went up and down, so I decided just to stay with it to see what it did. Eventually, it faded, and when I returned to thinking, the worry that had started it had gone.”

Sonya had a similar experience, though she did feel something straightaway: “I knew that the thing that I would focus on was something that someone had said to my husband the other day. I found the phrase ‘leaving it on the workbench of the mind’ really helpful, as I did not have to do anything with it. I immediately felt a sensation in the lower side of my abdomen, so I focused on it and did what it said to do, imagining the breath was breathing into it, like we’d done in the Body Scan. Some of
the sensations stayed the same and others seemed to come and go. Then, without me prompting anything, a quite different thing came into my mind—something to do with my son’s school work—and the sensations in the body changed instantly to a feeling of constriction in my upper chest and throat. Then it reversed again. When I held all these in awareness, it really helped to say ‘softening, opening’ as I breathed out. For the first time, I think I really got the idea of not trying to make anything happen—I was exploring the sensations, not wanting to make them go away.”

Like Harry, when Sonya returned to her thoughts, she found that the situations that had been troubling her, although they were still there, did not have the urgency they’d had before. What had happened to them?

Bringing mindful acceptance to our difficulties works for two interconnected reasons. First, it breaks the initial link in the chain that leads to a negative downward spiral. By accepting our negative thoughts, feelings, emotions and bodily sensations—by simply acknowledging their existence—we are preventing the mind’s automatic aversion pathways from kicking in. If we do not engage with the downward spiral, we progressively sap its momentum. If we do this during its first all-important twists and turns, as Harry and Sonya did, it never gains enough momentum to perpetuate itself. It just runs into the sand.

Remember the experiment by Richard Davidson and Jon Kabat-Zinn using the sensors on the scalp that measure the electrical activity of the left and right front parts of the brain (see p.
47
)? They found that after mindfulness training, the biotech workers were able to maintain an approach-orientated, exploratory mode of mind, even when they were experiencing sad
moods. Our own Oxford research published in 2007 has found that even people with a history of depression and suicidal feelings are able to make the same shift toward approaching, rather than avoiding, as indexed by the activity in their brains, after they have participated in a mindfulness course.
⁴
Harry and Sonya were experiencing the same thing: the release that follows when we are able to approach difficult situations without triggering the body’s powerful “aversion” systems.

As we saw earlier, when a difficulty comes to mind, the brain’s habitual reaction is to treat it as a real enemy, so it tends to shut down its creative “approach” systems. For some difficulties, it might be necessary to shut down playfulness, but when you are remembering the past or anticipating the future, the difficulty is playing out in our heads and not for r
eal, so this is unnecessary. In fact, it ends up locking things down and blocking creativity: we either feel trapped and the body slumps into submission or the body gears up to fight or flee. Do you remember the brain scanning study we mentioned in Chapter Two (see p.
27
)? This found that in people who are low on a scale of mindfulness—those who rush from one thing to another, who find it difficult to stay in the present and who get so focused on their goal that they lose touch with the outside world—the amygdala (at the heart of the fight/flight system) is chronically overactive.
⁵
You may think that rushing through life gets more done, but you are instead activating the brain’s aversion system and undermining the very creativity you’re seeking.

The second reason why bringing mindful acceptance to our difficulties works is because it allows you to become aware of the
accuracy
of your thoughts. Take the thought:
I can’t cope. I’m going to scream.
If you observe how you react to the thought, and actively feel the clenching muscles in the
shoulders and stomach, before the sensations eventually fade away, you’ll see more c
learly that it was a fear and not a fact. You did cope with the situation; you didn’t scream. It was a powerful and compelling fear, but it was never a fact. Cross-checking thoughts with reality is a powerful antidote to negativity in all its forms.

Over the past few weeks, you’ve been practicing the Breathing Space twice a day and whenever you felt that you needed it. Now we suggest that
whenever
you feel troubled in your body or mind, you should see the Breathing Space meditation as your first port of call.

After completing a Breathing Space, you have four options open to you. As we said last week, the first option is to simply carry on as before, but with enhanced awareness. This week we suggest that after a Breathing Space you should gently and seamlessly “drop into” the body to explore any physical sensations that arise as difficulties appear in the mind. This week’s Breathing Space is very similar to the one you’ve used over the previous weeks, but it has been refined to help you explore difficulties with a greater degree of compassion. It is this week, perhaps more than any other, that the Breathing Space acts as a bridge between the longer, more formal meditation sessions and daily life. You should carry out the three steps of the meditation as usual, but incorporate the extra refinements detailed below. Your awareness should follow the usual hourglass shape. In addition to this, you are asked to pay special attention to the extra instructions in Step Three,
as these will help you explore difficulties with greater warmth and compassion.

You have already practiced observing—bringing the focus of awareness to your inner experience and noticing what is happening in your thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations. Now you may like to experiment with
describing, acknowledging
and
identifying
them by putting the experiences into words. For example, you might say in your mind:
I can feel anger growing
or,
Self-critical thoughts are here.

You have already practiced gently
redirecting
your full attention to the breath by following it all the way in and all the way out. This week you could also try saying at the back of your mind,
Breathing in … breathing out
.

You could also try counting each breath in and each one out. For example, you can say to yourself on the first in-breath, “breathing in—one,” and when you exhale, you can say to yourself, “breathing out—one.” On the next in-breath you can say “breathing in—two” … and so on all the way up to five, before starting again at one.

You have already practiced allowing your attention to expand to the whole body. This week, rather than resting in full awareness for a while, as you’ve done previously, gently allow
your consciousness to include any sense of discomfort, tension or resistance, just as you did with the Exploring Difficulty meditation. If you notice any of these sensations, bring your attention right up to and into them by “breathing into” them. Then breathe out from them, softening and opening as you do so. At the same time, say to yourself, “It’s OK to feel this. Whatever it is, it’s OK to be open to it.” If the discomfort dissolves, return to focusing on the spaciousness of the body.

If you feel able, allow this step to take more than the customary minute or so, staying with the awareness of your bodily sensations and your relationship to them, breathing with them, accepting them, letting them be, allowing them to be just as they are. See it as an extra step, if that helps, or perhaps as a bridge back to daily life. So rather than immediately carrying on with your life where you left off, rest awhile in awareness and explore the messages your body is sending you within the space of awareness.

As best you can, bring this expanded awareness to the next moments of your day.

Nurturing a plant, or sowing some seeds, are among those very simple things in life that can have a surprisingly big benefit. It might even save your life. In the late 1970s, Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer and her team conducted a now classic series of experiments in which they asked a group of elderly people in a care home to look after a plant in their room.
⁶
They were told it was their responsibility to water it and make sure it
received enough food and light. At the same time, another group of elderly people had a plant placed in their room, but were told “not to worry about it.” The nurses would look after it for them. The researchers then measured the levels of happiness in the two groups of people and found, to their surprise, that those asked actively to look after a plant were noticeably happier and healthier. They lived longer too. Just the act of caring for another living thing had markedly improved their life.

So this week, why not
sow some seeds or buy or borrow a plant from a friend? If you plant seeds, why not sow those that bees can feed off? There’s something mesmerizing about bees at work. Alternatively, why not sow the seeds of a plant you can later eat, such as tomatoes, lettuce or spring onions? As you sow the seeds, feel their texture and that of the soil. Is there any tension in your body, perhaps localized in your neck and shoulders? As you sprinkle the soil over the seeds, watch how it falls through your fingers. Now do it at half speed. Does it feel any different? What does the soil smell like? Does it have a deep, earthy aroma or the slightly acidic smell of sandy soil? When you water the seeds or the young plants, pay close attention to the way the light glints off the droplets. Why not spend a little time finding out more about the plants you’ll be nurturing?

In the preface to the second edition of her book,
Here for Now
, Elana Rosenbaum wrote:
⁷
“Sometimes people ask me: ‘Are you cured?’ ‘Cured of what?’ I ask them.”

She concludes: “I am alive. I am well. I continue to challenge myself to be fully here for now. What about you?”

K
ate sat silently. The psychologist sat with her, allowing the silence to be there for a while, as the noise of the busy hospital corridor outside the interview room continued. She’d been admitted twenty-four hours earlier, after taking an overdose of her antidepressants. Physically, she was well, the effect of the pills having worn off—but she still felt exhausted. She also felt ashamed, angry with herself, and wished she had not done it; she felt very sad and alone.

When asked by the nurse why she had taken the pills, Kate said she didn’t really know—that she’d felt desperate, that she’d had to do something and couldn’t think of anything else to do. She did not really think that she would die—she did not actually
want
to die. It was more a feeling of wanting to escape for a while—to pull the bedclothes over her head to make the world go away. Life had gotten too complicated. So many people
depended on her and she felt she’d let them all down. “Perhaps,” she felt, “if I take myself out of the way, everyone else’s life would be so much better.”

As she began to talk to the psychologist, more of her story came out. Things in life had been pretty straightforward at one time: school, college, her job as a secretary, a mother and father that lived a few hours away, steady boyfriends—no one special right now, but not too lonely—a good circle of friends (“What will they think?” she suddenly asked, and began to cry).

Kate’s life had been thrown into turmoil eighteen months before when she’d had a car accident that she felt was her fault, although the insurance companies had decided that no one was at fault. No one in either vehicle had been injured, but for Kate, the scars were in her mind, not on her body. She had been taking her six-year-old niece, Amy (her sister’s daughter), to the mall. Amy was also OK after the crash, and even seemed to be able to talk about what had happened without being scared or traumatized at all. And Kate’s sister had just been relieved that nothing too serious had happened to her daughter and to her beloved sister.