Mindfulness: A practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world

by J. Mark G. Williams

The audio programme is also available for free to you at the following location: https://soundcloud.com/hachetteaudiouk/sets/mindfulness-a-practical-guide-to-finding-peace-in-a-frantic-world If you would prefer to receive a copy of the CD, please contact info@littlebrown.co.uk with the subject line ‘Mindfulness ebook CD request’ and include your postal address.

You come to realise that thoughts come and go of their own accord; that you are not your thoughts. You can watch as they appear in your mind, seemingly from thin air, and watch again as they disappear, like a soap bubble bursting. You come to the profound understanding that thoughts and feelings (including negative ones) are transient. They come and they go, and ultimately, you have a choice about whether to act on them or not.

Mindfulness is about observation without criticism; being compassionate with yourself. When unhappiness or stress hover overhead, rather than taking it all personally, you learn to treat them as if they were black clouds in the sky, and to observe them with friendly curiosity as they drift past. In essence, mindfulness allows you to catch negative thought patterns before they tip you into a downward spiral. It begins the process of putting you back in control of your life.

• It will not deaden your mind or prevent you from striving towards important career or lifestyle goals; nor will it trick you into falsely adopting a Pollyanna attitude to life. Meditation is not about accepting the unacceptable. It is about seeing the world with greater clarity so that you can take wiser and more considered action to change those things which need to be changed. Meditation helps cultivate a deep and compassionate awareness that allows you to assess your goals and find the optimum path towards realising your deepest values.

when you start to feel a little sad, anxious, or irritable it’s not the mood that does the damage but how you react to it. • the effort of trying to free yourself from a bad mood or bout of unhappiness – of working out why you’re unhappy and what you can do about it – often makes things worse. It’s like being trapped in quicksand – the more you struggle to be free, the deeper you sink.

As soon as we understand how the mind works, it becomes obvious why we all suffer from bouts of unhappiness, stress and irritability from time to time.

When you begin to feel a little unhappy, it’s natural to try and think your way out of the problem of being unhappy. You try to establish what is making you unhappy and then find a solution. In the process, you can easily dredge up past regrets and conjure up future worries. This further lowers your mood. It doesn’t take long before you start to feel bad for failing to discover a way of cheering yourself up. The ‘inner critic’, which lives inside us all, begins to whisper that it’s your fault, that you should try harder, whatever the cost. You soon start to feel separated from the deepest and wisest parts of yourself. You get lost in...

We get drawn into this emotional quicksand because our state of mind is intimately connected with memory. The mind is constantly trawling through memories to find those that echo our current emotional state. For example, if you feel threatened, the mind instantly digs up memories of when you felt endangered in the past, so that you can spot similarities and find a way of escaping. It happens in an instant, before you’re even aware of it. It’s a ...

Mindfulness meditation teaches you to recognise memories and damaging thoughts as they arise. It reminds you that they are memories. They are like propaganda, they are not real. They are not you. You can learn to observe negative thoughts as they arise, let them stay a while and then simply watch them evaporate before your eyes. And when this occurs, an extraordinary thing can happen: a profound sense of happiness and peace fills the void.

Meditation creates greater mental clarity; seeing things with pure open-hearted awareness. It’s a place – a vantage point – from which we can witness our own thoughts and feelings as they arise. It takes us off the hair-trigger that compels us to react to things as soon as they happen. Our inner self – the part that is innately happy and at peace – is no longer drowned out by the noise of the mind crunching through problems.

Mindfulness operates on two levels. First and foremost is the core mindfulness meditation programme. This is a series of simple daily meditations that can be done almost anywhere, though you’ll find it most helpful to do them in a quiet spot at home. Some are as short as three minutes. Others may take twenty to thirty minutes. Mindfulness also encourages you to break some of the unconscious habits of thinking and behaving that stop you from living life to the full. Many judgmental and self-critical thoughts arise out of habitual ways of thinking and acting. By breaking with some of your daily routines you’ll progressively dissolve some of these negative thinking patterns and become more mindful and aware. You may be astonished by how much more happiness and joy are attainable with even tiny changes to the way you live your life.

Lucy exists in a netherworld of overwork, general low-level unhappiness, dissatisfaction and stress. She’s been sapped of her mental and physical energy and has begun to feel increasingly rudderless. She desperately wants to be happy and at peace with herself, but has no idea how to get there. Her unhappiness and dissatisfaction aren’t severe enough to warrant a trip to the doctor, but enough to sap many of life’s joys. She exists, rather than truly lives. Lucy’s story is hardly unique. She is one of countless millions who are neither depressed nor anxious in a medical sense – yet who are not truly happy either. We all go through life with rises and falls in mood and energy. Often these changes in mood come out of the blue. One moment we’re happily bumbling through life, daydreaming, feeling content and unfussed, but then something subtle happens. Before we know it, we’re starting to feel a little stressed: there’s too much to do and not enough time, and the pace of demands seems ever-more relentless. We feel tired, but find that even after a good night’s sleep we don’t feel refreshed. And then we stop and ask ourselves: How did that happen? There may have been no big changes in life, we haven’t lost any friends nor have our debts suddenly spiralled out of control. Nothing’s changed, but the joy has somehow gone out of life and been replaced with a sort of generalised distress and listlessness.

Depression is taking a staggering toll on the modern world. Around 10 per cent of the population can expect to become clinically depressed over the coming year. And things are likely to become worse. The World Health Organization1 estimates that depression will impose the second-biggest health burden globally by 2020. Think about that for a moment. Depression will impose a bigger burden than heart disease, arthritis and many forms of cancer on both individuals and society in less than a decade. Depression used to be an illness of the late middle-aged; now it strikes most people first when they are in their mid-twenties, and a substantial number of people suffer their first bout in their teens.2 It can also persist, with around 15–39 per cent of sufferers still depressed after one year. Around one-fifth remain depressed for two or more years – the definition of ‘chronic’ depression.3 But the scariest thing of all is that depression tends to return. If you’ve been depressed once, there is a 50 per cent chance of a recurrence – even if you’ve made a full recovery.

Take thoughts as an example. Several decades ago, it became apparent that thoughts could drive our moods and emotions, but it’s only since the 1980s that it’s become clear that the process can also run in reverse: moods can drive our thoughts. Think about that for a moment. Your moods can drive your thoughts. In practice, this means that even a few fleeting moments of sadness can end up feeding off themselves to create more unhappy thoughts by colouring how you see and interpret the world. Just as gloomy skies can make you feel, well, gloomy, momentary sadness can dredge up unsettling thoughts and memories further deepening the mood. The same goes for other moods and emotions too. If you feel stressed, then this stress can feed off itself to create more stress. Likewise with anxiety, fear, anger and such ‘positive’ emotions as love, happiness, compassion and empathy.

Something as subtle as frowning, smiling or altering posture can have a dramatic impact on mood and the types of thoughts flickering across the mind

Psychologist Johannes Michalak5 and colleagues at the Ruhr-University at Bochum used an optical motion capture system to see how depressed people differ from non-depressed people as they walk: they invited depressed and non-depressed people to their lab, and asked them to walk, choosing freely how to walk and at what speed. They tracked the walkers’ three-dimensional movements using over forty small reflective markers attached to their bodies as they walked up and down. They found that the depressed volunteers walked more slowly, swinging their arms less; the upper body did not move up and down very much when they walked, but was more likely to swing from side to side instead. Finally, they found that the depressed people walked with a slumped, forward-leaning posture. It is not just that such slumped posture is the result of being depressed. If you try the experiment of sitting for a minute with your shoulders slumped forward and head down, notice how you feel at the end of it. If you feel your mood has worsened, perhaps finish the experiment by shifting to a posture in which you are sitting upright, with your head and neck balanced on your shoulders.

To get a flavour of how powerful this feedback can be, the psychologists Fritz Strack, Leonard Martin and Sabine Stepper6 asked a group of people to watch cartoons and then rate how funny they were. Some were asked to hold a pencil between their lips so that they were forced to purse them and mimic a scowl. Others watched the cartoons with the pencil between their teeth, simulating a smile. The results were striking: those who were forced to smile found the cartoons significantly funnier than those compelled to frown. It’s obvious that smiling shows you are happy but it is, admittedly, a bit strange to realise that the act of smiling can itself make you happy. It’s a perfect illustration of just how close the links are between the mind and body. Smiling is infectious too. When you see someone grin, you almost invariably smile back. You can’t help it. Think about that for a moment: just the act of smiling can make you happy (even if it’s forced); and if you smile, others will smile back at you, reinforcing your own happiness. It’s a virtuous cycle.

But tension, unhappiness or exhaustion aren’t ‘problems’ that can be solved. They are emotions. They reflect states of mind and body. As such, they cannot be solved – only felt. Once you’ve felt them – that is, acknowledged their existence – and let go of the tendency to explain or get rid of them, they are much more likely to vanish naturally, like the mist on a spring morning.

When you try and solve the ‘problem’ of unhappiness (or any other ‘negative’ emotion) you deploy one of the mind’s most powerful tools: rational critical thinking. It works like this: you see yourself in a place (unhappy) and know where you want to be (happy). Your mind then analyses the gap between the two and tries to work out the best way of bridging it. To do so, it uses its ‘Doing’ mode (so called because it performs well in solving problems and getting things done). The Doing mode works by progressively narrowing the gap between where you are and where you want to be. It does so by subconsciously breaking down the problem into pieces, each of which is solved in your mind’s eye and the solution re-analysed to see whether it’s got you closer to your goal. It often happens in an instant and we’re frequently not even aware of the process. It’s a tremendously powerful way of solving problems. It’s how we find our way across cities, drive cars and arrange hectic work schedules. In a more refined form, it’s how the ancients built the pyramids and navigated the world in primitive sailing ships, and it is helping humanity to solve many of our most pressing problems.

People genuinely believe that if they worry enough over their unhappiness they will eventually find a solution. They just need to make one last heave – think a little more about the problem … But research shows the opposite: in fact, brooding reduces our ability to solve problems; and it’s absolutely hopeless for dealing with emotional difficulties.

The mind can do so much more than simply analyse problems with its Doing mode. The problem is that we use the Doing mode so much, we can’t see that there is an alternative. Yet there is another way. If you stop and reflect for a moment, the mind doesn’t just think. It can also be aware that it is thinking. This form of pure awareness allows you to experience the world directly. It’s bigger than thinking. It’s unclouded by your thoughts, feelings and emotions. It’s like a high mountain – a vantage point – from which you can see everything for many miles around.

Pure awareness transcends thinking. It allows you to step outside the chattering negative self-talk and your reactive impulses and emotions. It allows you to look at the world once again with open eyes. And when you do so, a sense of wonder and quiet contentment begins to reappear in your life.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking out new landscapes but in having new eyes. (ATTRIB. MARCEL PROUST, 1871–1922)

Changing your perspective can transform your experience of life, as the above examples show. But they also expose a fundamental problem – they all occurred because something outside of you had changed: the sun came out, you went on holiday, time passed. And, the trouble is, if you rely solely on outside circumstances changing in order to feel happy and energised, you’ll have to wait a very long time. And while you wait, constantly hoping that the sun will come out or wishing that you could travel to the peace and tranquillity of an imagined future or an idealised past, your actual life will slip by unnoticed. Those moments might as well not exist at all.

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.

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.

People spend hundreds of thousands of pounds – 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.

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’.

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 and 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 towards’ these feelings and whatever emotions are threatening to engulf you. This compassionate approach gradually dissipates the power of your negative feelings.

We re-live past events and re-feel their pain, and we pre-live future disasters and so pre-feel their impact.

Now we can let you into a secret: if you shift along any one of these dimensions, the others shift as well. For example, during the mindfulness programme you can practise letting go of avoidance and find yourself being less judgmental as well; you can work on ‘staying present’ and you’ll also find yourself taking your thoughts less literally; if you cultivate greater generosity towards yourself, you’ll find that you also have more empathy for others. And, as you do all of these things, a natural enthusiasm, energy and equanimity bubble up like a long-forgotten spring of clear water.

You will soon come to realise that while a certain degree of comparing and judging is necessary for daily life, our civilisation has raised them up to be gods. But many choices are false choices – you simply do not need to make them. They are driven by your thought stream. Nothing more. You don’t need to compare yourself endlessly to others. There is no need to compare your life (or standard of living) with either a fictitious life in the future or some rose-tinted view of the past. You do not need to lie awake at night trying to judge the impact that a passing comment you made in a meeting will have on your career prospects. Nor do you need to concern yourself with a throwaway comment made by a friend. If you simply accept life as it is, you will be a lot more fulfilled and increasingly worry free. And if any action should need to be taken, then the wisest decision you can make will most likely pop into your mind when you are not brooding about it at all.

For many years it was assumed that we all have an emotional thermostat which determines how happy we are in life. Some people were presumed to have a happy disposition, while others had a miserable one. Although major life events, such as the death of a loved one or winning the lottery, can significantly alter mood, sometimes for many weeks or months on end, it was always assumed that there was a set-point to which we always return. This emotional set-point was presumed to be encoded in our genes or became set in stone during childhood. To put it bluntly, some people were born happy and others were not. Several years ago, however, this assumption was shattered by Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin and Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. They discovered that mindfulness training allowed people to escape the gravitational pull of their emotional set-point. Their work held out the extraordinary possibility that we can permanently alter our underlying level of happiness for the better.

Kirk Brown and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester, New York, have discovered that more mindful people engage in more autonomous activities. That is, they do not do things because others want them to or pressure them into doing them. Nor do they engage in tasks just to help them look good to others, or even to help them feel better about themselves. Rather, those who are more mindful spend more time doing things that they truly value, or that they simply find fun or interesting to do.2

Numerous recent clinical trials have shown that meditation can have a profoundly positive effect on physical health.14 One study, funded by the US National Institutes of Health and published in 2005, discovered that the form of meditation that has been practised in the West since the 1960s (Transcendental Meditation) leads to a massive reduction in mortality. Compared with controls, the meditation group showed a 23 per cent decrease in mortality over the nineteen-year period that the group was studied. There was a 30 per cent decrease in the rate of cardiovascular mortality and a 49 per cent decrease in the rate of mortality due to cancer in the meditation group compared with combined controls.15 This effect is equivalent to discovering an entirely new class of drugs (but without the inevitable side effects).

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 realise that your thoughts are not ‘real’ or ‘reality’. They are simply mental events. They are not ‘you’.

At the very moment when you realise 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 realise 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 tranquillity will lengthen and the time it takes for you to realise that your mind has raced off will shorten. Even the disappointment can be recognised 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

When you reach the point where such overload has seized up the conscious mind, it’s very difficult to reverse the process simply by thinking your way out, for this is like opening yet another program on the computer, overlayering it with yet another window. Instead, you need to find a way of stepping outside the cycle almost as soon as you notice it’s begun. This is the first step in learning to deal with life more skilfully. It involves training yourself to notice when your autopilot is taking over, so that you can then make a choice about what you want your mind to be focusing upon. You need to learn to close down some of the ‘programs’ that have been left running in the background of your mind. The first stage of regaining your innate mindfulness involves returning to basics. You need to relearn how to focus your awareness on one thing at a time.

But once you see the difference that paying full attention can make to the small things in life, you start to get an inkling of the cost of inattention. Just think of all the pleasures of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching that are drifting by you unnoticed. You may well be missing vast portions of your daily life. You only ever have a moment to live, this moment, and yet we all tend to live in the past or in the future. We only rarely notice what is arising in the present moment.

We can tell you this. And you can believe it. But that is not the same as truly knowing it. And the only way you can remember this point – when you really need it, when the world seems to be slipping through your fingers – is by discovering it for yourself. Time and time and time again.

It’s very important that you do make a commitment to yourself to carry out the meditation. It requires practice, but don’t forget that these meditations have been proven in numerous studies around the world to help people. They do, however, work most fully if you put in the required time each day. They may not appear to have instant benefits; you have to practise. And to embed these benefits, you need to commit yourself to completing the eight-week course.

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.

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 ground-breaking (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’.

Once again, it is important to keep in mind that there isn’t necessarily a connection between how much you are enjoying the practice and its longer-term benefits. It can take time for the mind to reconnect fully with the body as countless networks in the brain have to rewire and strengthen themselves. This process doesn’t have to be difficult, but it often is. Why? Here is one way of looking at it: When you are training your attention, it’s like going to the gym after a long time away. It’s as if you are exercising a muscle that has been underused. As with resistance training in the gym, in which you push your arms or legs against a carefully chosen weight, so that the muscles can redevelop their strength, so in the Body Scan you are asking your attention to focus for longer periods than usual on something that you usually ignore – your body.