Read Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World Online
Authors: Mark Williams,Danny Penman
Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (6 page)
As we explained in Chapter Two, it’s all too easy to become locked into a cycle of suffering and distress when you try to eliminate your feelings or become enmeshed in overthinking. Negative feelings persist when the mind’s problem-solving
Doing
mode (see p.
28
) volunteers to help, but instead ends up compounding the very difficulties you were seeking to overcome.
But there
is
an alternative. Our minds also have a different way of relating to the world—it’s called the Being mode.
1
It’s akin to—but far more than—a shift in perspective. It’s a different way of knowing that allows you to see how your mind tends to distort “reality.” It helps you to step outside of your mind’s na
tural
tendency to overthink, overanalyze and overjudge. You begin to experience the world directly, so you can see any distress you’re feeling from a totally new angle and handle life’s difficulties very differently. And you find that you can change your
internal landscape
(the
mindscape,
if you will
2
) irrespective of what’s happening around you. You are no longer dependent on
external
circumstances for your happiness, contentment and poise. You are back in control of your life.
If Doing mode is a trap, then Being mode is freedom.
Throughout the ages, people have learned how to cultivate this way of being, and it’s possible for any of us to do the same. Mindfulness meditation is the door through which you can enter this Being mode and, with a little practice, you can learn to open this door whenever you need to.
Mindful awareness—or mindfulness—spontaneously arises out of this Being mode when we learn to pay attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without judgment, to things as they actually are.
In mindfulness, we start to see the world as it is, not as we expect it to be, how we want it to be, or what we fear it might become.
These ideas may initially seem a little too nebulous to grasp fully. By their very nature they have to be experienced to be properly understood. So to ease this process along, the next section explains the “Mindful” (Being) mode of mind by contrasting it with the Doing mode, point for point. Although some of the definitions and explanations may remain a little unclear to you for a short while longer, the actual benefits of mindfulness are beyond question. In fact, it is possible to see the long-term benefits of mindfulness taking root in the brain using some of the world’s
most advanced brain-imaging technology (see pp.
46–9
).
As you read the rest of this book, it will be helpful to remember that Doing mode is not an enemy to be defeated, but is often an ally. Doing mode only becomes a “problem” when it volunteers for a task that it cannot do, such as “solving” a troubling emotion. When this happens, it pays to “shift gear” into “Being” mode. This is what mindfulness gives us: the ability to shift gears as we need to, rather than being permanently stuck in the same one.
Being locked into the busyness of Doing mode erodes a vast chunk of your life by stealing your time. Take a moment to look at your own life:
- Do you find it difficult to stay focused on what’s happening in the present?
- Do you tend to walk quickly to get to where you’re going without paying attention to what you experience along the way?
- Does it seem as if you are “running on automatic,” without much awareness of what you’re doing?
- Do you rush through activities without being really attentive to them?
- Do you get so focused on the goal you want to achieve that you lose touch with what you are doing right now to get there?
- Do you find yourself preoccupied with the future or the past?
3
In other words, are you driven by the daily routines that force you to live in your head rather than in your life?
Now extrapolate this to apply to the life you have left to you. If you are thirty years old, then with a life expectancy of around eighty, you have fifty years left. But if you are only truly conscious and aware of every moment for perhaps two out of sixteen hours a day (which is not unreasonable), your life expectancy is only another six years and three months
.
You’ll probably spend more time in meetings with your boss! If a friend told you that they had just been diagnosed with a terminal disease that will kill them in six years, you would be filled with grief and try to comfort them. Yet without realizing it, you may be daydreaming along such a path yourself.
If you could double the number of hours that you were truly alive each day then, in effect, you would be doubling your life expectancy. It would be like living to 130. Now imagine tripling or quadrupling the time you are truly alive. People spend hundreds of thousands of dollars—literally—on expensive drugs and unproven vitamin cocktails to gain an extra few years of life; others are funding research in universities to try to expand radically the human lifespan. But you can achieve the same effect by learning to live mindfully—waking up to your life.
Quantity isn’t everything, of course. But if it’s true, as research suggests, that those who practice mindfulness are also less anxious and stressed, as well as more relaxed, fulfilled and energized, then life will not only seem longer as it slows down and you are really here for it, but happier too.
Doing mode is truly brilliant at automating our life using habits, and yet it’s the feature that we notice the least. Without the mind’s ability to learn from repetition, we’d still be trying to remember how to tie our shoelaces, but the downside comes
when you cede too much control to the autopilot. You can easily end up thinking, working, eating, walking or driving without clear awareness of what you are doing. The danger is that you miss much of your life in this way.
Mindfulness brings you back, again and again, to full conscious awareness: a place of choice and intention.
The mindful, or Being, mode allows you to become fully conscious of your life again. It provides you with an ability to “check in” with yourself from time to time so that you can make intentional choices. In Chapter One, we said that mindfulness meditation frees up more time than it takes to carry out the practices. This is the reason why. When you become more mindful, you bring your intentions and actions back into alignment, rather than being constantly sidetracked by your autopilot. You learn to stop wasting time pointlessly running through the same old habits of thinking and doing that have long since stopped serving any useful purpose. It also means that you are less likely to end up striving for too long toward goals that it might be wiser to let go of for a while. You become fully alive and aware again (see below).
Doing mode needs to think. It analyzes, recalls, plans and compares. That’s its role and many of us find we’re very good at it. We spend a great deal of time “inside our heads” without noticing what’s going on around us. The headlong rush of the world can absorb us so much that it erodes our sense of presence in the body, forcing us to live inside our thoughts, rather than experience the world directly. And, as we saw in the previous chapter, those thoughts can easily be shunted off in a toxic direction. It
does not always happen—it’s not inevitable—but it’s an ever-present danger.
Mindfulness is a truly different way of knowing the world. It is not just thinking along a different track. To be mindful means to be back in touch with your senses, so you can see, hear, touch, smell and taste things as if for the first time. You become deeply curious about the world again. This direct sensory contact with the world may seem trivial at first. And yet, when you begin sensing the moments of ordinary life, you discover something
extra
-ordinary; you find that you gradually cultivate a direct, intuitive sense of what is going on in your inner and outer worlds, with profound effects on your ability to attend to people and the world in a new way, without taking anything for granted. This is the very foundation of mindful awareness: waking up to what’s happening inside of you, and in the world, moment by moment.
The Doing mode involves judging and comparing the “real” world with the world as we’d like it to be in our thoughts and dreams. It narrows attention down to the gap between the two, so that you can end up with a toxic variety of tunnel vision in which only perfection will do.
Being mode, on the other hand, invites you temporarily to suspend judgment. It means briefly standing aside and watching the world as it unfolds, while allowing it to be
just as it is
for a moment. It means approaching a problem or a situation without preconceptions, so that you are no longer compelled to draw only one preconceived conclusion. In this way, you are saved from closing down your creative options.
Mindful acceptance does not mean resignation to your fate. It’s an acknowledgement that an experience is here, in this moment—but, instead of letting it seize control of your life, mindfulness allows you, simply and compassionately, to observe it rather than judge it, attack it, argue with it or try to disprove its validity. This radical acceptance allows you to stop a negative spiral from beginning; or if it already has begun, to reduce its momentum. It grants you the freedom to choose—to step outside your looming problems—and, in the process, it progressively liberates you from unhappiness, fear, anxiety and exhaustion. This gives you far greater control over your life. But most important of all, it allows you to deal with problems in the most effective way possible and at the most appropriate moment.
When in Doing mode, the mind uses its own creations, its thoughts and images, as its raw material. Ideas are its currency and they acquire a value of their own. You can begin to mistake them for reality. In most circumstances, this makes sense. If you have set out to visit a friend, you need to hold your destination in mind. The planning, doing, thinking mind will get you there. It makes no sense to doubt the truth of your thinking:
Am I really going to see my friend?
In such situations, it’s useful to take your thoughts to be true.
But this becomes a problem when you feel stressed. You might say to yourself:
I’m going to go mad if this goes on; I should be able to cope better than this
. You can take
these
thoughts to be true as well. Your mood plummets as your mind
reacts in a way that is often very harsh:
I am weak; I’m no good.
So you strive harder and harder, ignoring the messages of your punished body and the advice of your friends. Your thoughts have ceased to be your servant and have become your master, and a very harsh and unforgiving master at that.
Mindfulness teaches us that thoughts are just thoughts; they are events in the mind. They are often valuable but they are not “you” or “reality.” They are your internal running commentary on yourself and the world. This simple recognition frees you from the dislocated reality that we have all conjured up for ourselves through endless worrying, brooding and ruminating. You can see a clear path through life once again.
Doing mode solves problems not only by bearing in mind your goals and destinations, but also by holding on to “anti-goals” and the places you
don’t
want to go to. This makes sense when, for example, driving from A to B because it’s useful to know which parts of town or the highway network to avoid. But it becomes a problem if you use the same strategy for those states of mind you’re desperately trying to avoid. For example, if you try to solve the problem of feeling tired and stressed, you will also keep in mind the “places you don’t want to visit” such as exhaustion, burnout and breakdown. So now, in addition to feeling tired and stressed, you begin conjuring up new fears for yourself, and this only enhances your anxieties and stresses, leading to even more exhaustion. Despite its best efforts, Doing mode, used in the wrong context, leads you step by step towards burnout and exhaustion.
Being mode, on the other hand, encourages you to “approach”
the very things that you feel like avoiding; it invites you to take a friendly interest in your most difficult states of mind. Mindfulness does not say “don’t worry” or “don’t be sad.” Instead it acknowledges your fear and your sadness, your fatigue and exhaustion, and encourages you to “turn toward” these feelings and whatever emotions are threatening to engulf you. This compassionate approach gradually dissipates the power of your negative feelings.