If you choose to sit on the floor, you may want to buy a traditional pillow used for the purpose of seated meditation. These are called zafu. They are sold in many stores that sell Asian goods. If you can’t get one, you can simply use a pillow, scrunched up under your bottom. It isn’t quite as effective, but it works. You will want your bottom to be high enough off of the ground so that your knees naturally contact the floor when you are sitting.
There are three basic postures other than the lotus position that you can choose from. They are the half-lotus, the quarter-lotus, and the Burmese. In the half-lotus posture, you cross your legs and lift one foot onto your hip joint. In quarter-lotus, you sit cross-legged and lift one of your feet onto your knee. In the Burmese posture, you sit on the pillow, with both legs lying on the floor, one in front of the other, in a kind of abbreviated cross-legged position. All of the other points on posture discussed above apply.
If you choose to sit in a chair, make sure that you keep your spine straight. Do not lean your back against the back of the chair, but rather sit a little bit “out” on the chair, and let your body maintain an erect posture without the support of the chair. You will want your knees to be at ninety degrees from your hip joints. Your feet should be planted firmly on the floor, separated by about the width of your shoulders, with your toes pointing straight out in front of you. Again, all of the other points discussed above apply to this seated position.
The last point about sitting in this posture is this: Be still. Try not to move at all during the duration of your sit. If you find yourself shifting about, bring yourself back to the present, and sit still. Just sitting means not moving, to the degree this is possible. If you practice, you will be amazed at how still you can become.
The practice. The practice is to sit. There is no “goal” to speak of. There are, however, some things to keep in mind as you practice. Remember the exercise you did in chapter 6 where you watched your thoughts drift down a stream on floating leaves? Much of sitting meditation is about practicing this skill. You don’t need to focus on anything in particular and you shouldn’t try. Just let your mind generate whatever it wants to, and watch what it does with the time. Let the thoughts come in and go out. Simply watch them pass by.
Inevitably, there will be times when you get caught up in your thoughts. You may start daydreaming, or you may get trapped in your psychological pain. You may think about what you had for breakfast, what time the kids are due home from school, what movie you want to watch that night, or an ex-girlfriend you haven’t seen in years. As you know, your mind is extremely adept at creating thought. It’s likely you’ll find when you sit quietly that it seems as if your mind’s already natural talents have been amplified. You may have millions of thoughts flowing through your mind, and it’s likely you’ll get caught in them from time to time.
When this happens, simply notice that it has happened, and try to bring yourself back to the present moment and your observing self. Note that you have been in a thought and then return to the here and now. You’ve been practicing this skill over the course of the last two chapters, so you should have some sense of how to do this by now.
You may want to employ some of the defusion techniques that you learned in previous chapters. One technique that is particularly effective to use while sitting is to label your thoughts. As you watch your thoughts pass before your mind’s eye, you may say, “I am having the thought that I had eggs for breakfast,” or, “I am having the feeling that I am sad.” It is also useful to note when you have drifted off, and even the thought that you have drifted off with: “I have been daydreaming about my ex-girlfriend. I am having the thought that I have been daydreaming.”
You might also try using the exercise “Cubbyholing” above. This can be particularly effective while you sit, because it is brief but still allows you to notice your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations as they come and go.
Follow your breath. Another practice you can add to your sitting meditation is to “follow your breath.” Simply watch your breath come in and go out of your body. This happens naturally. Feel the breath come in, feel the breath go out. Allow it to happen without getting in the way. If you want to, you can count your breaths, from one to ten. Once you have reached ten, go back to one. Just keep on watching your breath.
All kinds of content will come up when you sit. Your anger, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem— all of these may surface. Just watch them come in and go out. As they appear, treat them with kindness, the way you would pat a visiting child on the head in acknowledgment of his presence.
Physical pain. One matter that is very likely to come up while you sit, particularly when you start sitting longer for longer periods of time, is physical pain. Pain can be a very difficult distraction to sit through. Physical pain is an amazing phenomenon. It is remarkable how much your mind can focus on it.
Remember the studies we cited about chronic pain and the willingness to experience it in chapter 4? Trying to get free of physical pain can be as much a matter of experiential avoidance as trying to escape emotional pain, and, indeed, the methods discussed in this book have been shown to be helpful for people who suffer with physical pain (see the appendix). As such, we recommend that you try to sit with your pain, rather than getting up and moving around when you feel you “can’t do it anymore.” If you practice, you will find that you can sit with a lot more than you ever thought possible.
It is very likely that physical pain will be your greatest temptation to move. For novice practitioners, this is almost universally the case. Everyone goes through the pain of sitting at first; even the most experienced meditation teachers have had this experience. Sit with the pain for as long as you can. If you find that you absolutely can’t continue to hold the position, move about just enough to adjust yourself, then resume your sit. If you give up, and avoid the experiences that pain brings, you will condition yourself not to sit at all. If you choose not to sit, that is one thing. If you allow experiential avoidance to dictate this choice to you, then you will have fallen into the same old trap.
Of course, it is necessary to take care of yourself, and if you have a real injury, you should attend to that. Be gentle with yourself. Gently press yourself forward, and continue with your practice.
MINDFULNESS IN CONTEXT
All of the material in this book works together. Many of the techniques you’ve learned in this chapter will be useful as you enter other components of the ACT program. Not only do you want to take mindfulness with you into your daily life, you will need to take it with you as you move forward with this book. In fact, you can take mindfulness with you and move backward in the book as well.
If you feel that you need to do some more work in cognitive defusion, try taking these mindfulness strategies with you and review some of the previous chapters.
It is also true, as noted in sections of this chapter, that many of the techniques presented here can be used in conjunction with one another. Experiment. See what works for you. Feel free to use many different mindfulness practices at the same time and combine techniques as you see fit. There are no hard rules to tell you how you “have to” be mindful. Do what makes sense for you.
There is no “right” way to be all of the time. Pretending that is true will simply lead you back into the traps that your verbal repertoire generates so well. Mindfulness is not the “right” way to live any more than anything else is. The practice is built to help you increase your psychological flexibility; to allow you to broaden the repertoire of responses that you can make to any given situation. Many studies have demonstrated that increasing psychological flexibility is very helpful for people who are suffering from the kind of distress that led you to pick up this book and work with it (see appendix).
None of the techniques in this chapter will work simply by reading about them, any more than reading about physical exercise will build your muscles. The techniques will be of value to you only if you do them, and do them repeatedly. If you
have been reading this chapter for understanding, fine. You understand. Now practice. You will need these skills as we now deliberately move toward the pain that led you to pick up this book in the first place.
Chapter 9
What Willingness Is and Is Not
In chapter 4, we roughly defined acceptance and willingness as an answer to the question “Will you take me in as I am?” We said that to be accepting and willing is to say yes to the universe of private experience in the moment. Here is a quote from Dag Hammarskjöld, Former secretary-general of the United Nations, that expresses some of the power of saying yes to what life and your experience affords:
I don’t know Who—or what—put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone—or Something— and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.
—Dag Hammarskjöld
In this section of the two chapters that specifically deal with the concept of willingness, we will try to define what it means to say yes and we will practice doing so. First, however, you need to decide if now is the right time for you to do this. To do this, you need to be clear about what there is to be accepted. If you know what needs to be accepted in order for you to move ahead toward what you really care about in your life, then now is the time. If you aren’t sure, then skip ahead to chapters 11 and 12, and return to chapters 9 and 10 after you finish working with chapters 11 and 12.
WHAT NEEDS TO BE ACCEPTED?
In some ways, acceptance of your experience is required, even when the situation calls for deliberately changing your experience. If you accidentally put your hand on a hot stove, you would immediately pull it back. If you did it quickly enough, you might even avoid tissue damage and the pain might pass in a matter of seconds. But to do that you needed to know first that you were hurting.
One of the saddest side effects of the chronic unwillingness to feel is that we begin to lose our ability to know what it is that we are avoiding. As mentioned in chapter 7, “alexithymia” (literally: “without words for feelings”) is a clear example of the unwillingness to feel. If you chronically avoid what you feel, eventually you do not know what you are feeling at all. That’s sad for two reasons. First, it’s far easier to make mistakes in life as a result. For example, you may begin a bad relationship by missing the signs your own feelings would give you that your new love interest is very similar to past partners who didn’t work out for you.
Or, by not recognizing the uneasy feelings that might have warned you, you could take a job that would be unhealthy or excessively stressful for you. Like someone who’s lost the sense of pain, experiential avoiders can place their psychological hand on top of the hot stove and just leave it there to burn. Second, it is known that experiential avoiders actually tend to respond more intensely to events, both positively and negatively (Sloan 2004). In the service of keeping their distance from the pain they might otherwise feel more acutely than others, experiential avoiders also stand aloof from the joy they otherwise might feel more acutely than others.
Our general point is that acceptance doesn’t mean that your emotions will change, just as defusion doesn’t mean that your thoughts will change. Ironically, if change is possible at all, it is more likely to take place when we adopt an accepting and defused stance. When you avoid getting into an unhealthy relationship, for example, in a very real way you’ve avoided both pain and damage, just as removing your hand from a stove avoids both pain and damage. But first you had to feel the pain or you wouldn’t have removed your hand.
There are other kinds of pain that are not like a hot stove. These are forms of pain that either necessarily come along with healthy actions or are historical in their nature, conditioned, and not based on the current situation. If you exercise vigorously, your muscles will be sore. If you study hard, you will be tired. If you remember a past loss, you will be sad. If you open up to relationships, you will feel vulnerable. If you care about the world, you will know that others are hurting. Most psychological pain seems to be of this type.
Anxiety is usually not based on real danger; depression is usually not based on the objective current situation. Feelings that are historical in their nature, conditioned, and not directly caused by the current situation are like that. Some of these feelings are not very good guides to action. For example, someone who has suffered abuse may be afraid of intimacy, even if that person’s current partner is sensitive and kind.
In these kinds of situations, acceptance and willingness are needed for a second reason: without them, healthy action is not possible. Consider someone with panic disorder who has had several panic attacks in shopping malls and no longer dares to go inside a mall. Anxiety is, in part, a conditioned reaction. If shopping, freedom of movement, and the like are important to that person, eventually, it will be time to reenter shopping malls. That doesn’t mean that the conditioning will now be magically removed. When such a person enters a mall again, guess what this person will then face? Anxiety. If that is unacceptable, the person now has an insurmountable barrier.
Ironically, as discussed earlier, anxiety is only exacerbated by trying to get rid of it directly. If this person decides to wait until the anxiety disappears until beginning to live again, he or she is likely to wait a very long time.
When we say “acceptance” or “willingness” in this book we are not referring to accepting situations, events, or behaviors that are readily changeable. If you are being abused by someone else, “acceptance of abuse” is not what is called for. What may be called for is acceptance that you are in pain, acceptance of the difficult memories that have been produced, and acceptance of the fear that will come from taking the necessary steps to stop the abuse.
If you have an addiction problem, acceptance of substance abuse is very likely not what is called for. What may be called for is acceptance of the urge to use drugs, or acceptance of the sense of loss that may result from giving up your favorite coping strategy, or acceptance of the emotional pain that will arrive when you stop relying on drugs or alcohol to regulate your emotions.
You may know right now what you need to accept in order to move ahead. If that is so, then this chapter and chapter 10 should be read next. Now, look at the following questions and see what comes up for you. If you have no idea what to write, just skip to the next question.
EXERCISE: What Needs to Be Accepted
The memories and images I most avoid include: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
Avoiding these memories and images costs me in the following ways: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
The bodily sensations I most avoid include: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
Avoiding these bodily sensations costs me in the following ways: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
The emotions I most avoid include: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
Avoiding these emotions costs me in the following ways: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
The thoughts I most avoid include: _______________________________________________________________ ________________
_______________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
Avoiding these thoughts costs me in the following ways: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
The behavioral predispositions or urges to respond that I most avoid include: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
Avoiding these behavioral predispositions and urges to respond costs me in the following ways: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
We just listed five domains of avoidance (memories and images; bodily sensations; emotions; thoughts; and behavioral predispositions and urges to respond), and we’ve asked about the costs in each of these domains. If you were able to respond to the questions in two or more domains of those listed above, and if two or more of these have clear costs, then you are ready to proceed. If not, go on to chapters 11 and 12 and then return to this chapter.
THE GOAL OF WILLINGNESS
The goal of willingness is flexibility. When you are able to be fully present in the here and now without being judgmental or without pushing away experiences (thoughts, feelings, emotions, bodily sensations, and so on) you have much more freedom to take needed steps to action. If you are willing to have an emotion, feeling, thought, or memory instead of attempting to control it, then the agenda of control is undermined, and you are free from the inevitable by-products of this agenda. These by-products are fairly predictable. First, you lose the war with your own internal content. If you refuse to have that internal content, you’ve got it. If you aren’t willing to lose it, you’ve lost it. Next, you lose the ability to control your own behavior in a flexible and effective way.
Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life Page 18