by Ed Halliwell
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The importance of body posture
In our practice, we work to adopt a posture that embodies mindful attitudes. By feeling our feet on the floor, we’re cultivating a sense of groundedness. By inviting the spine to rise and our body to be uplifted, we cultivate confidence and wakefulness. By allowing the chest to expand, and letting go of tensing the muscles, we move towards connection and openness.
The posture we adopt seems to be important – there’s a link between how we hold ourselves physically and the tone of our experience. In a famous experiment, a group of students were asked to put on headphones and rate sound quality. The researchers said they wanted to check the headphones would work when people were running, so they asked some participants to move their heads up and down, simulating a jog. Others were asked to move their heads from side to side.
Actually, the experiment had nothing to do with running, or even sound quality – the researchers wanted to test whether the head movements affected the students’ perspective. They did – when asked to rate the headphones, those asked to nod rated them more highly than the head-shakers.
The voice in the headphones had been discussing proposed rises to tuition fees at the college, and when later asked to take part in a survey about the changes, the head-shakers suggested a much smaller fee rise than the nodders. Simply moving the head seemed to unconsciously influence how the students felt about two very different issues.1
There have been many experiments on the effect of body posture on perception and mood. Psychologist James Laird discovered that people feel happier when asked to make facial movements that created a smile, whereas they felt more angry when asked to clench their teeth.2 In another study, it was found that adopting a strong sitting posture for just one minute increases confidence.3
Just as mood and perception affect behaviour, so behaviour affects perception and mood. As the US psychologist William James suggested over a century ago: ‘I don’t sing because I’m happy. I’m happy because I sing.’
You can experiment with this yourself. Try taking a hunched, slouching sitting posture with your shoulders slumped, head down and arms folded. Now say to yourself: I feel cheerful and connected. Most people experience the posture and the words as incongruent. Now take an upright, dignified posture, and notice the difference. Most people say they feel more energized and confident.
If we take an uplifted and open posture, embodying a willingness to turn towards difficulty with resilience, we’re sending a signal to our minds and bodies that this can be done, without being overwhelmed.
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Week 6: practices to explore
Work with either the mindfulness of body practice or the body scan each day, experimenting with ‘turning towards’ difficult sensations and thoughts when these arise, and when this feels manageable for you.
Continue to practise the three-step breathing space at regular times, and when you notice stress arising. Be aware of urges to react impulsively to stress, and practise staying present with mindfulness, turning your attention towards sensations in the body. Say gently to yourself: It’s okay for me to feel what’s happening right now.
Pay attention to body posture. Ask yourself: ‘Am I holding myself in a way that cultivates qualities of mindfulness: centring, confidence, cheerfulness and compassion?’ Let go of self-judgements and be interested in what you find. Experiment with making mindful posture adjustments, and noticing what effect, if any, this has.
Ask yourself: ‘Is there anything I’ve been putting off in my life, something that needs attention and which I’m avoiding?’ If an issue comes up when you ask this question, notice how the avoidance feels and explore possibilities for mindfully shifting towards it. Remember to be gentle – if what’s being avoided feels overwhelming, it may be best to start with something smaller. Remember also that approach doesn’t always mean action. You can explore how shifting towards feels by first bringing the situation to mind as a difficulty in your meditation practice.
Choose a C of mindfulness to work with this week, following the guidance in chapter 2.
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Simon’s experience
If you’re signing up for being more aware, you can’t be selective and say: ‘Well, I’m only going to tune in to the good stuff.’ It’s important to be aware of what’s going on, to feel all the sensations, whether they’re painful or not. It’s so easy to run away, but if you run away from internal or external pain, then you give it huge power to derail your life and your contentment, because then you’re living in fear of it.
If you can move towards it and deal with it, you take its power away. So even if you do need to deal with the more tricky stuff, it’s worth it. Mindfulness gives you tools to know how to deal with this stuff. As for the pleasant sensations, bring ‘em on.
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Ann’s experience
I did my first mindfulness taster day when my back was particularly bad. We did a body scan and that was the first time I just focused on the pain. It was painful but I went with it, which is what we were being asked to do. I felt like I was kind of balancing on the pain, and on the rest of my body, and by the end the pain had gone. That was a real light bulb moment for me – it made me think: There’s something in this. I could see how it was related to letting go of habits.
I was a great one for distraction techniques, where you go and do something because you don’t want to think about something else. I tend to confront things more now, because I know they need to be dealt with. On the course we worked a lot on facing things, rather than shying away from them – that resonated very much with me. I’ve always been one who can cope with the bigger disasters but the little things brought me down. I realized you can confront even the little things. Just because it’s a little problem doesn’t mean you shouldn’t deal with it.
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Andy’s experience
Some people think mindfulness is a form of avoidance, but there’s nothing avoidant about working with difficulty. You can’t swerve stuff when it’s hard. You can drink, you can take drugs, you can live with your head in the sand – there are all sorts of strategies you can employ to avoid difficulty – but they tend to trap us and be self-defeating.
Now I can actually sit alongside difficulty and pain and it doesn’t absorb me 100 per cent, or lead me to go on a bender. Compared to five years ago I feel I’m grounded enough to deal with pain and let myself feel it rather than getting drunk when thoughts are spinning round and round in my head.
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Catherine’s experience
My default setting is to move away from discomfort. If something’s not working I tend to try and change it rather than just being with it. Sometimes you do have to change things but I automatically think: Don’t go there, let’s get away.
It helps to get comfortable with discomfort, being open to accepting what’s there. For example, I’m not very good with noise – and I’ve got three children! Even if they’re just chatting and messing around in a jokey way, I find my default is to tell them to be quiet. So I’ve worked to get comfortable with the noise and often notice that they’re actually speaking to each other quite nicely; they’re having a bit of fun.
Difficult things are a part of life. It’s how we react that’s important. If you can treat them in a kind way, it helps you deal with them – it’s not as bad. I’ve found sometimes that if you breathe into tension, it releases it.
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SUMMARY
Once we’ve developed a foundation of mindfulness, we can start to take an approach mentality, even when things are difficult. We can train ourselves to say ‘yes’ to the present moment, welcoming it in with open hearts. We can move towards experience, even when it feels frightening or painful.
Taking a mindfulness course leads to a neural ‘left shift’, signifying an approach mode that’s linked to wellbeing. If we can
approach what’s happening with courage, curiosity, compassion and cheerfulness, we’re developing real power.
Turning gently towards difficulty is a transformative shift that dissolves barriers to effective living.
Opening to the difficult can’t be rushed or forced. Sometimes it’s best to wait before shifting towards, especially if our experience feels overwhelming.
Acceptance and compassion are essential components of turning towards difficulty.
There’s a link between how we hold ourselves physically and the tone of our experience. In our practice, we work to adopt a posture that embodies wakefulness.
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Chapter 7
Letting go
‘The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self.’
ALBERT EINSTEIN
When we let go, we actually become free to live in peace. Rather than fighting or trying to escape from the world, we can start to recognize and open to it. We can carry our opinions, our relationships, our dreams and our problems with a lighter touch.
The Buddha told a tale about a king looking for amusement. Instructing a servant to gather a group of men who’d been blind since birth, the king presented them with an elephant. Each man was introduced to a different part of the animal, and then asked to describe what an elephant is like.
Every one of the men gave a different report. Touching the head, one man said the elephant was like a pot; another, holding the foot, said it was like a pillar; another, feeling the trunk, said it was like a plough, while one holding the tip of the tail said it was like a brush. The story goes that the men began arguing over the correct answer, becoming so angry they started trading blows.1
We (and everything else) are like the elephant in the story – experienced without clarity, things can feel definite and solid, but when we really open our eyes, they appear more fluid. What we see depends on how and where we’re looking.
As in the elephant story, stress comes when we cling to views and labels that are based on a limited perspective, rather than seeing the bigger picture. With fixation comes suffering.
Not holding on
In the Buddhist tradition, three hallmarks of existence are described. The first of these is dissatisfaction – there’s a stress that seems to come from our habitual way of living. The second is impermanence – things are subject to change, and however hard we try, nothing can ever be made to stay the same. The third is that there’s no essential self: no independent entity that we can pin a label on and say: ‘That’s me’.
The good news is that the first hallmark of existence can be eased, even transcended, by fully realizing, appreciating and shifting into alignment with the second and third. Our stress comes from trying to grasp the ungraspable and resist the irresistible – when we accept that things are impermanent, and there’s no essential self-nature, we’re liberated to live in accordance with reality, like an undammed river flowing free. There are still difficulties, but by flowing and working with what’s happening rather than against it, we’re less likely to suffer.
The heart of the path of mindfulness lies in this injunction: ‘Nothing whatsoever should be grasped at and clung to as ‘me’ or ‘mine’.2 When we stop trying to hold on, we actually become free to live in peace. Rather than getting caught up in ourselves and treating every misfortune as a personal affront, we can learn to live more lightly, recognizing that things are always in transition. By letting go into this truth, we can experience a happiness that isn’t dependent on getting things ‘right’. As the Thai meditation master Achaan Chah put it: ‘If you let go a little, you will have a little happiness. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of happiness. And if you let go completely, you will be free.’ Every time we drop our fixations, we’re able to live in liberation.
Letting go like this isn’t easy. As we’ve seen, our habits of perceiving and behaving are strongly entrenched. Even the idea of non-attachment can seem daunting, impractical, or even undesirable. What about our loved ones – are we not supposed to cling to them? Or our homes – should we throw the deeds away and let anyone come to stay, perhaps trying to live without money or possessions? And where does this leave our ideals – should we let go of aspirations for a better life or world?
Non-clinging is a profoundly alien concept for most of us. Our human history and culture points us to grasping – to our friends and family, to our opinions and feelings, to our belongings, our sense of being an individual, and to life itself. And yet, we could ask ourselves: does this way produce happiness?
The suggestion that clinging leads to unhappiness is not meant as an opinion about morality, or an ideological statement. It’s offered as an observation about how the mind, the body and the world work: to be explored and tested in the laboratory of experience. If things are impermanent and there’s no essential self to be found, then trying to hold on to material objects or fixed identities is bound to produce suffering. So is it true? Is there anything that’s truly permanent or independent?
Are things impermanent?
Take a flower. Literally if you can – connecting with an object through the senses helps make this investigation practical and grounded, rather than just intellectual or theoretical. Ask yourself – is the flower staying the same, or is it changing? Is it the same flower as it was yesterday, and will it be the same tomorrow? Is it growing, opening, or wilting? If you took a video of the flower over a few hours and sped up the playback, would you be able to see it changing form?
Now what about everything else around you? Is the home you live in exactly the same as it was 100 years ago, 10 years ago, one year ago, a month ago or yesterday? Is the weather the same as it was this morning, or has it become warmer, cooler, brighter, cloudier, or started or stopped raining? Are the seasons coming and going, rivers rising and falling, bacteria, insects, fish and animals being born, living, dying, even whole species emerging, mutating and becoming extinct? Have the continents shifted position over thousands and millions of years, and do they continue to do so?
And what about you? Are you the same person you were 10 years ago, five years ago, one year ago, last week? Do you look precisely the same, have exactly the same ideas, like the same things, or feel the same way as at each of these other time points? Have your perspective and capacities changed – your skill set, vocabulary, opinions, strength and flexibility? Are the thoughts going through your mind right now precisely the same thoughts you were having this time last month, or even a minute ago?
What about body sensations – are they staying the same, or are they shifting, perhaps subtly, from moment to moment? And how about your body itself – are its constituent parts altering, even with each breath as new molecules of air enter and leave? Cells, muscles, blood, skin, bone, vital organs – are these static or in flux, degenerating, regenerating, and mutating?
And what about other people? Are your friends and family getting older, subtly changing what they know, do, or think? If you took a photo of any person once a day for a whole lifetime, would their appearance remain the same in all the pictures? Do countries, cultures and civilizations change? Where are ancient Rome, the Soviet Union or Rhodesia now? Where are the ideas and political systems believed in by the people who lived there?
Now ask yourself: is there anything in the appearing world that isn’t in transition? Aren’t even mountains and oceans subject to shift? Aren’t stars – including our own sun – destined to fizzle out? Don’t cosmologists tell us that our universe itself is continually changing – whether that’s exploding into being, expanding, contracting, or some day imploding? So far as we can tell, there’s nothing in the appearing world that isn’t subject to ongoing flux.
See if you can connect with this – not just as a thought or an idea but as an experience. Can you connect with this as phenomenal truth? Do you notice any resistance to it? Does fear arise? Or calm? How does your body feel? Can you sense this flow
of ongoing change or does it feel abstract? Is this experience changing from moment to moment too? Are you changing with it?
So who are you?
Now, perhaps we might be ready to ask – who is this ‘you’ anyway? If your thoughts and sensations are changing from moment to moment, along with your physiology, then where is your essential personhood?
When asked this question, many people point to their bodies. But let’s say you lose a finger – are you still the same you then? What about an arm? Or a leg? Or both legs? If yes, then are the body parts that have been lost still you? What about if you undergo a heart transplant? Are you still you with someone else’s heart? Has the organ donor transferred some of their self to you? If every aspect of your body – muscles, skin, blood, cells – is constantly shifting form, then which bits constitute the real you?
Some people might say, ‘I am my mind’. So what about those automatically arising thoughts or sensations that you’ve been watching in meditation? How can they be ‘you’ if they aren’t consciously chosen? What are they doing in ‘your’ experience?