by Ed Halliwell
Alternatives to the breath
For some people, the breath isn’t a stable anchor for attention training, at least to begin with. If you experience hyperventilation or panic attacks, or have a history of breathing problems, it may make sense to start with another object. Paying attention to sensations in the feet (either sitting or walking) or the hands can be an alternative to mindfulness of breathing.
Week 3: practices to explore
Set aside some time each day for mindfulness of breathing – perhaps five, 10 or 15 minutes (decide how long before you begin, and stick to it, as best you can). See if you can do this without setting any goals to be achieved (such as becoming more focused). Come back to the breath each time you notice mind-wandering.
At regular points in the day, ask yourself the questions Matt Killingsworth used in his study: ‘How am I feeling? What am I doing? Am I paying attention to what I’m doing?’ Listen to any answers that come, and be interested in the effect of the questions.
Notice patterns of absent-mindedness in daily life, and practise mindfulness of breathing when you realize you’ve drifted. It can be helpful to place a few reminders around the environment to call you back to attention – a sign on your fridge, say, inviting you to pause before you open the door. You could set an hourly chime on your computer to invite you into some conscious breaths (download one at www.mindfulnessdc.org/mindfulclock.html).
Use delays to help you come back to awareness. Shopping queues, traffic jams, late trains and waiting at home for deliveries are all excellent opportunities to practise mindfulness. In time, you might even start to welcome these delays, rather than seeing them as causes of frustration.
Choose a different ‘C’ of mindfulness to work with this week, following the guidance in chapter 2.
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Simon’s experience
I was brought up by parents who’d say things like: ‘Well, that would happen, wouldn’t it?’ It was a kind of ‘the world is against us’ approach. Mindfulness has been a significant step in undoing that programming. I think there’s a very different way of looking at the world – you don’t have to get on the drama triangle every five minutes.
As you grow up, you’re programmed to process the world in a certain way, and seeing that is key. Rather than viewing the world as like a jungle where there are snakes and wild animals that can damage you and throw you off track, I now see it as more of a pleasant path through a field. It’s not that things don’t go wrong, but the way I react to them is very different. Most of the time I’m able to be a calmer, more reflective person.
It’s important to experience life in a genuine way: to fully experience being alive, which is a privilege. There are challenges that come with this – I find situations that would have bounced off me before can be more intense and uncomfortable, such as being with insensitive people who are less concerned about how they impact on others – but now I just remove myself from those people when I need to.
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Ann’s experience
I went to Australia a few months ago and there was so much to do and see. One day we went to the Great Ocean Road. The light was really good for taking photographs, and there were tourists everywhere, bustling up and down a boardwalk. That would have been me before: I’d have been at every vantage point taking pictures, and actually missing the experience.
I used to be so busy that I didn’t really see things around me. I was in such a rush that I didn’t feel or taste anything. I was just onto the next thing. Mindfulness has helped me realize that I missed a lot.
So this time, after I’d taken a few pictures, I just sat on a bench that had a lovely view and stayed there for 10 minutes, enjoying the moment. It was such a beautiful thing to see, and not just through a camera lens.
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Andy’s experience
Where we live there used to be lots of cart tracks with deep, muddy holes you could get stuck in. In a similar way, there are probably three or four really boggy cart tracks that my mind goes down, and those tend to be where I’ll wake up when my mind has drifted. One is beating myself up about stuff from the past – things I’ve said or haven’t done properly.
Another boggy track I go down is planning – my friends call me the scoutmaster because I’m always making a plan. That can be useful but it can also generate anxiety. We can plan and learn from our mistakes, but we can also beat ourselves up about the past and be really anxious about what’s ahead. I call it the beauty and the beast of being human.
I still get negative thoughts, but mindfulness allows me to step back, refocus and respond more kindly to myself. Rather than staying in that deep, boggy hole, I climb out. When I notice my mind wandering, I just say: ‘Hey ho, it’s busy mind again’.
Mindfulness of breathing helps me settle. I’ve identified that I have a busy, scatty mind that likes to run at 200 miles an hour, and that’s okay. My mind will still run off all over the place, but I can notice it and come back to the breath again and again.
I especially tap into mindfulness of breath in theatres, which still freak me out a little bit. I feel sort of trapped in them, so I do mindfulness of breath to ground myself. I do settle – it takes me probably five to 10 minutes.
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Catherine’s experience
If you’re in the moment, you let a lot more joy in – noticing the flowers or a funny thing your child said, or the sunset. It only has to be a few seconds at a time, but if you can be aware of ten of those moments each day it brings a lot more gratitude.
I still get lost, taken away by my mind, but there are also lots of small instances now where I notice. I just had my lunch and I was reading on my Kindle at the same time. I was like, Hang on a second, let’s put it down and notice this cheese I’m eating. There are lots of little moments like that – I’m more present and appreciative of things.
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SUMMARY
Working at speed, the mind is on autopilot much of the time. It’s taking shortcuts and making guesses, mostly based on past experience.
By training in attention, we can begin to tame the mind, and to experience things more clearly.
Each time we practise mindfulness of breathing, we’re strengthening the capacity to pay attention.
Whatever happens when you practise, see if you can cultivate an attitude of ‘no problem’.
Research is showing the scale of our absent-mindedness, and the tangible effects of attention training. We’re distracted almost 50 per cent of the time, and less happy when we aren’t focused.
Long-term meditators perform better in attention tasks, as do beginners after they’ve taken a mindfulness course. The effects of mindfulness training can be seen in the brain’s attention networks.
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Chapter 4
Opening to space
‘We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.’
UNKNOWN
With awareness, we can discover a way of being that isn’t caught in the reactive jumble of thought, sensation and impulse. If we can distinguish and uncouple our interpretations from our experience, we start to be freed from bias.
What do you notice when you practise mindfulness of breathing? Most people find their attention won’t stay on the breath for long. The mind is drawn away, again and again, into thoughts, feelings, sounds, sights, smells – anything but the breath. It’s tempting to view this as a problem that mindfulness practice will rectify – if we train ourselves to keep coming back, won’t we soon be able to focus more easily?
Perhaps. But something else may be happening too. If you’ve discovered in mindfulness of breathing that you’re not fully in charge of your mind, you might like to ask yourself: How do I know this? How have I realized that the mind is distracted? And how am I able to bring it back? In order to notice that the mind has wandered, and be able to return it t
o attention, there must be something bigger than that mind, a wider perspective that can observe the distraction. That wider perspective is awareness.
Seeing with awareness
If I were to draw a V-shape on a piece of white paper, what would you think was there? A lot of people see a bird. Very few people say they see the sky, perhaps with a bird flying through it.1 We automatically focus on things, and we miss the space that contains things.
Awareness sees the whole picture. With it, we can experience life with a more open lens. From the narrow perspective of the autopilot, we might think it’s a bad thing to notice the mind drifting, but actually the reverse is true. The fact we can see it means we’re opening to greater consciousness.
It’s true that in mindfulness of breathing we’re cultivating the capacity to attend with greater stillness, stability and strength. But with awareness, we can discover a way of being that isn’t caught in the reactive jumble of thought, sensation and impulse, even when attention is drawn to it.
Imagine a cow standing in a very small field, hemmed in by fences. With little space, the animal is stuck – it can’t move freely, and it probably feels claustrophobic, angry perhaps, or frightened. Now imagine that the field is made bigger – the fences get moved back, and there’s more room to roam. Chances are the cow will be a lot more content.2
By opening to awareness, we’re expanding the field of perception. Without having to try to change the mind, the very space we offer it can bring release. Instead of being caught in thoughts, sensations and reactions, we find some room to breathe. We can discover a space in which to see what’s happening. As it’s easier to care for the cow in its more expansive field, so it’s easier to handle the wandering mind in the wide-open space of awareness.
We don’t have to try to make awareness happen. It emerges naturally from our willingness to disengage from the autopilot and return to the breath. Because we have made a decision to place the mind on breathing, the breath acts as a beacon. We’re called back to it when we notice the mind has wandered. Every noticing and every coming back inevitably happens in awareness.
Observing patterns
From this perspective, we can start to see patterns, becoming familiar with whatever tends to come up. What do we usually see? What most people report is that they notice thinking and sensing.
Thinking
In meditation practice, most people notice a lot of thoughts. The capacity for thought is very useful: it enables us to reflect on the past and plan for the future. Thinking in this way seems to set us apart as a species, and many of the great achievements of humanity have stemmed from it.
But as we’ve seen, thought isn’t always an accurate reflection of events: we can misread situations and think things that aren’t true. With negativity bias, thoughts can (mis) interpret life darkly: Why did I say that stupid thing to x? Now they won’t be my friend anymore, and they’ll tell everyone how awful I am. When we automatically believe what we think, it affects our mood and behaviour. Our experience of life is skewed.
Because thought is abstract, it takes us into a conceptual mode of processing – one step removed from direct sensory experience. When we get caught up in a concept, it can be as if we aren’t really here. We’re absent-minded, up in our heads.
Thinking can be a wonderful thing, but when it’s our master rather than servant, it can get us into trouble, luring us away from direct experience. Each time we notice thoughts in our practice, we’re freeing ourselves from the tyranny of thinking. There is a world of difference between thinking: ‘I am stupid’, and ‘noticing the thought that I’m stupid’. We’re discovering that it’s possible to relate to our thoughts, rather than just from them.
Chances are, thoughts will continue to occur as we practise, and we don’t have to try to stop them. Noticing them without judgement, we begin to see how we get distracted by thinking. By letting thoughts be as they are, and returning to the breath, we gradually loosen our attachment to thinking.
Neither following nor rejecting them as they pass through the space of the mind, we can see more clearly that ‘thoughts are not facts’. They are just thoughts, an aspect of, but not the whole of our being. We can experience the world in a way that includes but is bigger than concept. This realization can be deeply liberating. If we’re not our thoughts, then we don’t have to react based solely on thoughts that may or may not be true.
Sensing
In mindfulness of breathing, we’re paying attention to a sense perception: the feeling of breath in the body. As we practise, we may find the mind wanders to other sensory experiences. There might be feelings of pressure, tightening, opening or warmth (for example) somewhere in the body, or maybe we’re drawn to external perceptions, such as sights and sounds.
Sensations can exert a powerful pull on attention, especially when they’re unpleasant. A throbbing in our back can magnetize our mind – the discomfort dominates and draws us in. As well as the painful throbbing, we may also notice automatic reactions to the sensation – a feeling of contracting in the back or other regions of the body, as we pull in or push away, reacting to the pain.
Let’s say while we’re practising mindfulness of breathing, we hear the sound of a neighbour’s dog barking. We feel a tensing up in our solar plexus, or a clenching in the jaw. Thoughts arise, such as: That animal never shuts up! I wish they would do something about him – they’re really inconsiderate. The tightening and clenching increases, and is perhaps joined by a sense of pressure at the temples.
In mindfulness practice, we don’t have to try and stop any of this. We can notice how we’re drawn from our chosen object of attention, such as the breath, and into thoughts and sensations. We can be aware of automatic reactions arising in the mind and body, letting them happen in the background.
In mindfulness of breathing, when we find that our attention has been drawn to thoughts or other sensations, the usual invitation applies – acknowledge the wandering mind, and gently escort it back to the breath. The thoughts and sensations may continue, but we can practise allowing them to be in the background, seeing them from the space of awareness, rather than being caught up in them.
Working with emotions
In meditation, we may often notice emotion. Internal storms can rage and attention is drawn into feelings of sadness, fear or anger. We experience pleasurable emotions too – bliss, joy or contentment.
Emotions are felt in the body – a heaviness or tingling in the solar plexus, a churning in the belly, a pressure at the nose, or a warmth or opening at the heart. Thoughts usually come along for the ride, categorizing the sensation. We feel a dropping in the chest and an urge to withdraw, and the thought comes: I’m sad.
Other thoughts might follow: I shouldn’t be sad; why am I sad? I’m sad because my partner left me – I’d better go and find another one. As well as the sensation, there may be an urge to react – anger arises (as an energy in the chest, for example) and we feel an impulse to attack. Like thoughts, emotions are often driven by previous experience. Whether we feel anger, sadness, fear or contentment seems to be influenced by implicit memories of previous, perhaps similar situations.
Just like thoughts and other sensations, emotions occur whether we want them to or not. In mindfulness practice, we notice these feelings and the thoughts that come with them. If we find it helpful, we could perhaps say to ourselves, Ah, heaviness in the solar plexus – I call this sadness. With this practice, we’re observing (and labelling) our experience, rather than automatically identifying with it.
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How awareness helps with low mood and anxiety
If we have a strong negativity bias, we’re more likely to believe that events are out of control: that we’re incapable and others are hostile.1 Seeing threats all around, the autopilot mind can spiral into a self-perpetuating cycle of worrying thoughts, looping round and round, stuck on high alert.
The more this happens, the more negativity bias is reinforced, and the less
of a trigger it takes to trip us into rumination and reaction – we forge ourselves a fearful groove. This can lead to depression, anxiety and other mood disorders,2 which become ever more likely with each recurring episode.3
Patterns of automatic thought and sensation become ingrained over the course of a lifetime, and over the lifetimes of our ancestors – we can’t simply decide not to have them. This is why crude attempts at positive thinking may not always help: we find ourselves denying or fighting the reality of experience.
Discovering an awareness that isn’t caught in autopilot, we can see thoughts and sensations for what they are – automatic reactions that may or may not accurately reflect a situation. In mindfulness practice, we notice our tendency to be caught in the autopilot, and gently disengage. We let go of fuelling habitual patterns.
People prone to depression and anxiety can get caught in negativity bias, and mindfulness seems to help. Studies show that practising mindfulness is more likely to help alleviate or regulate low mood and anxiety than rumination or suppression strategies. After mindfulness training, people ruminate less and are more able to see from a place of awareness.4
They’re less likely to get stuck in negativity bias5 and don’t get so caught up in rigid thinking patterns.6 This doesn’t mean that difficult thoughts or sensations don’t arise, but their sting can be lessened by recognizing patterns.