Contact with the Present Moment
As you begin to experience this “board level” aspect of yourself, it will become more possible to feel what you feel, think what you think, and remember what you remember. Pieces become less threatening. Of what threat are the pieces to the board? What does it matter if the pieces are crowded into one area of the board or the other?
Simply holding the pieces is something that is possible only at “board level.” Defusion, acceptance, and being who you are can thus be deepened by getting in touch with what is going on right now in this moment. The remaining exercises in this chapter and the next were developed specifically to help you get in touch with the present moment.
Traditionally, these exercises are referred to as “mindfulness” techniques, and we will use that term in the chapters that follow. However, we want to be clear that the word “mindfulness” used in this context doesn’t have much to do with the mind we’ve been urging you to defuse from throughout the course of this book. Here, we are referring to what some Eastern traditions call “big mind.” “The observing self” that was just contacted is part of “big mind” in the sense that it is without distinction (“no-thing/ every-thing”).
Mindfulness is the defused, nonattached, accepting, nonjudgmental, deliberate awareness of experiential events as they happen in the moment. It involves every aspect of the things we have already worked with.
Because there are so many things to be mindful of and so many different ways to practice, the remainder of this chapter focuses on some fairly simple, one-dimensional exercises. In chapter 8, we will focus on more sophisticated exercises that ask you to take into account a multitude of sensory and emotional experiences. But before you begin, we would like to offer a few words on how to practice.
How to Practice
Some tips that will come in handy as you practice mindfulness follow.
If you lose yourself in a thought, just gently come back to the exercise. As you start to be mindful of the thoughts and sensations that are going on in your mind and body, you will notice times when you start following the thought rather than just watching it. Do you remember watching the mind-train in chapter 5? Just about anyone who does that exercise ends up in one of the trains at some point. You probably had this experience yourself. This is perfectly natural. For the purpose of practicing these exercises, when you find yourself being drawn into a thought and following where it goes, simply observe what is happening and gently bring yourself back to the position of the observer. Then continue with the practice.
Defuse from your judgments. As you practice mindfulness, one of the things you will notice immediately is that your mind will start producing judgments. If you become trapped in your thoughts as described above, you might tell yourself, “Damn. I’m such a failure, I can’t even do these damned exercises correctly.” Or when you are feeling particularly mindful, you might hear yourself “say,” “Wow I’m really doing it, I am good at this mindfulness thing!” Or it perhaps you’ll think these exercises are a waste of time. You might think to yourself, “Why am I wasting my time on this crap? I have so much to do.” These are just some of examples of the millions of judgments your mind could come up with.
Any of these statements offers you some important information. They tell you that you’ve just become wrapped up in your word machine. It isn’t the form of the judgment that’s important, or the evidence for its truth or falsity. It’s that you are becoming entangled in judgment that’s important.
When you find yourself getting caught up in judging, gently notice that your mind is producing judgments, acknowledge your mind for all of its efforts on your behalf, and then go about the exercise just as before.
Accept your emotions. As you do these exercises, you will encounter some of the negative emotions you have been struggling with all this time. In fact, some of the exercises are designed to bring you into contact with these emotions. If you are suffering from depression or anxiety, for example, this may be difficult at times.
Or perhaps you have a panic disorder, and you already spend a great deal of your time and energy tracking your bodily sensations. Perhaps you are particularly worried about the speed of your pulse. Some people who suffer with panic are often completely convinced they are having a heart attack when no such event is taking place. You may be caught by this fear while you do these activities.
It may be that you are depressed and you struggle to keep yourself free from the cycles of obsessive negative rumination. When you come in contact with negative emotions or thoughts, you may start to get stuck in them. You may start to believe that your negative thoughts and emotions are the only thing that’s happening in the present moment.
The purpose of these exercises is to help you see that the present is an ever-changing event, an ongoing process that occurs from moment to moment. When you start to struggle with panicky feelings about having a heart attack, or you become trapped in negative ruminations, it is a sure sign that you are entering into the war zone again. Once again, gently notice that you are here as an observing conscious human being and try to open up to these feeling and thoughts as feelings and thoughts. Do not argue with them or try to make them go away.
Mindfulness is not a distraction technique. Mindfulness activities are not meant to distract you from the negative content of your mind. In fact, mindfulness and distraction are antithetical. Thinking that you can be “mindful enough not to feel the pain anymore” is just another story your word machine tells you. Using the techniques in this way is simply another avoidance measure that leads right back to the pain you are trying to avoid. Don’t try to escape your anxiety, or stress, or depression through mindfulness. If negative feelings come up, just notice them and keep on moving.
Practice. Mindfulness is probably not a stance that you are used to taking. In order to develop the skill, you need to practice it. As you begin to understand the basic underpinnings of mindfulness practice, you will naturally take it with you into the real world. Mindfulness is a practice you can engage in every moment of every day and, indeed, ACT gives you tools that will help you do just that.
GETTING STARTED
Now that you have some idea of the pitfalls to watch out for while you are practicing mindfulness, let’s get started with some exercises. What follows can be thought of as “Mindfulness 101.” These are some basic techniques that will give you a feeling of what it is like to observe what is going on in your mind and body without getting attached to your thoughts or feelings.
EXERCISE: Tracking Your Thoughts in Time
Because there are so many things to be mindful of, and this practice is not easy to develop, we want to start off small. We would like to begin by having you track your thoughts along a single dimension—time.
When thoughts, feelings, or bodily sensations arise, they tend to be associated with a certain time period in your life. Some lie in the past, some in the present, and some in the future. Even fantasies that have no basis in reality at all are generally associated with a particular time frame.
To see this more clearly, we would like you to take the next five minutes and track where in time your thoughts lie. Take a moment to center yourself. Breath deeply from your abdomen a few times. When you are relaxed, just let your mind wander at its will and watch what comes up. If you wish, you can use the “Floating Leaves on a Moving Stream” exercise you learned in chapter 6 to help you observe your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations.
While doing this, put your finger on the time line below. As your thoughts and feelings arise, slide your finger to the point on the time line that the thought or feeling corresponds to. You will notice that there are five points on the time line: distant past, recent past, present, close future, and distant future. You can choose any of these points for any thought that arises. However, note that this is a continuum, and if there is a point in the middle that makes more sense, feel free to place your finger on that point instead. Try to be accurate about what is happ
ening without judging what comes up. Just watch it and note where in time the thought, feeling, or sensation lies.
Now, take the next five minutes, let your mind go, and track your thoughts in time.
What did you notice about your thoughts? Was there a specific time that kept coming up, or did your thoughts move throughout time? Write a few notes on your experience below:
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ It is likely that your thoughts moved around throughout time. If they kept moving back to one place that’s fine too. The point is simply to notice the thoughts and where they occur in time. There are no judgments that need to be made based on this information.
Learning to be mindful of where in time your thoughts are can be helpful in shifting your focus to the present moment. Let’s repeat the exercise with a slightly different intention. This time do the exercise with the (gentle, defused) intention to stay more in the present. When your mind drifts and your finger must move to the right or left, just notice what is actually happening in the present moment. If you are drifting, notice that. If you are having a thought about the future or past, notice that you are now having a thought. Voila! When you do that, you are back in the present and your finger will be able to drift back toward the middle.
Notice that if you get too intentional (“I must go for the next five minutes with my finger on the word ‘present’”), you will actually enter the verbal future, or past (“I haven’t been doing it!”). If that happens, notice that you are now having a thought, and let go of your fusion with the content of that thought.
With practice, you can stay in the present for a large percentage of the time, and your finger will serve as a kind of biofeedback meter to train you in all of the methods your mind uses to knock you out of the present. This exercise can be done anywhere, anytime. For example, put your finger on your pant leg, and let it drift left, as if to enter the past, or right, as if to think to the future. You can do it easily while walking, sitting, or standing. It’s fun and a useful little form of practice.
Watching Bodily Sensations
Now we would like you to take the next few minutes to track your bodily sensations as they come and go. By having a structure, you can focus attention on a particular dimension of experience which, in turn, can help you see the distinct strands of a total naturalistic event later on.
On the next page you will find a figure of the human body. To the left of this diagram is a list of words that describe various sensations that commonly arise in the human body. To do this exercise, take a few moments to center yourself again. Then start to notice the different sensations that come up in your body. Perhaps your back aches from lifting too much at work. Or perhaps your stomach is knotted up with nervousness. Just notice how your body feels.
As the feelings arise, use one finger to point to the word that most accurately describes your feeling on the left-hand side of the page. With your other hand, point to the place in your body where the sensation resides. For example, if your shoulders are tight, you would point to the tightness with your left index finger and to the shoulder in the diagram with your right index finger. Take five minutes to notice bodily sensations as they come in and go out of your body now.
This exercise will be awkward at first (especially since initially you will need to search for the words). As you repeat it, however, it will become more fluid and you will be able to focus on observing, while allowing your fingers to do the “describing.”
Figure 7.1. Your body.
Once you have completed the exercise, take a few minutes to jot down some notes about what you experienced.
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ You probably noticed that different sensations came up over the course of the exercise. Bodily sensations tend to shift from one thing to the next, from moment to moment, just like everything else does.
Defusing from Implicit Evaluations
In the exercise above you may have noticed that the experiences you were tracking had an inherent evaluation in them. Your mind automatically evaluates emotions, thoughts, and bodily sensations as they arise. For example, if you had a comfortable bodily sensation, you might have thought “good.” If you drifted into the distant future in the time exercise, you might have thought “bad.” Just as the whole point of mindfulness is to stay in the present, it is also the point to defuse from such evaluations.
You just practiced detecting when you drifted from the present; now we would like you to practice detecting when you are drifting into evaluations. That’s relatively easy to do when the evaluative thoughts are explicit. It is harder when they are implicit. When they become combined with other experiences, they are easier to miss. The purpose of the next exercise is to learn to detect implicit evaluations, so that you can let them go and defuse from them.
Psychologists have shown that evaluations can occur reliably only along a limited number of dimensions. Good-bad and strong-weak are two of these primary polarities. Take a look at the box below. Notice that there are four terms in different areas surrounding the box. Think of this as a grid on which you can physically take note of where the nature of your evaluations lie in terms of how good or bad the evaluation is, or how strong or weak. Thus, in this exercise, simply sit quietly and become mindful of what is in the present moment. As you notice your experiences, see whether you are noticing them nonjudgmentally. If you find that you are implicitly evaluating, note the nature of that evaluation by placing your finger wherever your mind went, and see if you can let go of any attachment to the evaluation.
For example, suppose you have the thought “I’m anxious.” You might have just noticed that feeling nonjudgmentally and, if so, that’s fine. Do nothing but continue to observe. You also, however, might have noticed that, in the background of your thought, you were buying into the idea that this feeling is bad or too strong. If you sensed that implicit evaluation, place your finger in the upper right section of the box below. Then see if you can let go of this judgment. If you defuse from evaluations, you will find that you move your finger down into the bottom-middle part of the box (weak; neither good nor bad) and then move it out of the box altogether.
Now, please take the next several minutes to simply watch your own experience, detecting implicit judgments when they show up, and placing your finger in the box below as a kind of description of what is happening. Use the feedback this process provides to help you let go of fusion with the judgment altogether. See if you can gently create longer periods of time without having to buy into any evaluations that may appear.
Again, take a few minutes to respond to your experience.
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ What happened for you in this exercise? Did you notice that your evaluations moved around as your mind moved from one thought to the next? Were you able to dig out implicit evaluations that, normally, you might miss? Were you able to let go of these judgments?
TAK
ING THE NEXT STEP
These exercises are meant to begin the practice of observing defused and nonjudgmental moments in your present experience. In the next chapter, we will provide you with some more formal mindfulness exercises. Now that you have a basic feel of how to track single events, we are going to help you learn how to be aware of many different thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they come and go over time.
Chapter 8
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is difficult, not because it is hard but because it is elusive. We are constantly being hooked by our verbal predictions and evaluations. Furthermore, life is complex. There are many, many things to be mindful of and, as events become more complex, it is easier to lose our way. You could practice focusing on only one aspect of your experience the way you did in the last chapter, but ultimately that would severely limit the breadth and richness of your actual experience.
Practicing mindfulness isn’t going to do you much good if you just do the exercises written in this book and then forget about them. You need to make an effort to bring your attention more completely to the many moments in your life, fully, without defense, nonjudgmentally, defused, and accepting. Formal practice can help you acquire the skills, but it is informal practice, using these skills in your day-to-day life, that is most important.
This chapter will help you develop ways to deepen your experience with mindfulness by asking you to pay attention to many different types of experiences as they enter your awareness. It will also give you some concrete ideas on how you can institute a mindfulness practice into your daily life.
DAILY PRACTICE
Before moving on to the next battery of mindfulness techniques it is worthwhile to take some time to speak about when to practice mindfulness. Ultimately, the answer is “all the time.” The problem with this answer is that you probably aren’t accustomed to practicing mindfulness. It’s unlikely that you will randomly remember to apply mindfulness skills to day-to-day moments until they have become well established.
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