by Ed Halliwell
Many of us are in movement much of the time, and by remembering to tune in to body sensations as we travel, we’re reminding ourselves to be present in daily life.
One simple and traditional way of moving mindfully is walking meditation, described below. As a practice that invites a sense of groundedness, it can be good to practise this especially when we feel fragmented, anxious or spaced out.
Find a place where you can safely and comfortably walk – this can be indoors, in any room where you can move from one end to the other, or outside, say in a garden or park. Depending on where you’re walking, you might like to try this without shoes. Make an intention for how long you’ll practise.
Stand, perhaps opening your awareness to the whole body for a time, or taking some moments to scan the body from toes to head.
Direct your attention to sensations in the soles of the feet. Feel the feet on the floor – the connection of body to Earth.
Begin to take a step, lifting one foot off the floor slowly, being interested in which foot, and which part of that foot, you find yourself raising first. Notice other parts of the leg moving too. Feel your weight shifting forwards as you come into the downward movement, the foot coming back towards the floor. Bring awareness to the moment of contact, and the recalibration of the body with each aspect of the movement. Now step with the other foot (has this step already begun, without your being aware of it?).
Continue to walk, gently bringing the mind back to sensations in the feet when you notice it wandering away. Notice any tendencies to want to speed up, or to try to get somewhere. Notice how it is to be walking without a goal or destination. If you’re walking inside, and reach one end of the room, make a turn and continue to walk back to the other end.
As best you can, let there be a sense of confidence, lightness and precision to your walking, without forcing. Be interested in what happens – are you noticing any habitual patterns (rushing, zoning out, tensing)? Observe and let go with kindness. Continue walking like this for as long as you’ve intended.
Possible variations to explore:
As well as practising mindful walking with attention in the feet, try it with a wider acknowledgement of sensations in the whole body.
Expanding further, you could also include the full sensory palette in your practice – noticing sights, sounds and smells, or giving some attention to each at different times.
Making this a more informal practice, try mindful walking at ‘regular’ pace. Do you notice when you’ve missed moments in rumination or distraction? Slow down and come back to focus in the feet, as a means of grounding attention.
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Continuing your practice
Automatic patterns of distraction and reacting are persistent, and so the path of mindfulness continues. There are a number of tried and tested ways of helping this to happen.
Sustaining formal meditation
It’s good to carve out a regular time and space for ongoing meditation practice. By committing to this on a daily basis, we’re reminding ourselves of the value we place on awareness, and training ourselves in it. Like any skill, the more we practise, the more we’re likely to be able to manifest it spontaneously.
Make an intention for the practices you’d like to follow, how often and for how long. You could make a schedule for a period of a month, say, to begin with. Like an athlete preparing for a marathon, stick to what you’ve decided, whatever the internal and external weather. Re-set the intention (it can be good to write it down) at the end of the time period you’ve agreed with yourself, using what you’ve learned to make any appropriate adjustments (e.g. to the amount of time you devote to it, the time of day to practise, etc).
Mindfulness courses
It can be very nurturing to practise mindfulness with others, especially when guided by an experienced teacher. There are a number of good mindfulness courses (many of them following the model of eight weekly sessions) that offer training in the foundations of mindfulness. For those unable to find a local group, there are some courses available online. Practising intensively on a retreat (anything from a day to a month or more in duration) can also be transformative. There are some further resources at the end of this book to help you find a course or retreat.
Reading and study
Understanding the framework for mindfulness (its rationale, history, and attitudinal foundations) is a strong support for practice, although not an adequate substitute for it. Hearing how other people are working with mindfulness in their lives can also be a good reminder and inspiration. As well as books, there are magazines, websites, blogs, audios and videos that can offer support. There’s more information on how to access these in the further resources section.
Informal mindfulness practice
We’re practising mindfulness whenever we remember to live from awareness. As we’ve discovered, this is more easily said than done, and so the time and space for formal meditation continues to offer a foundation for this work. However, we can also extend our practice to any situation, using life events themselves as an opportunity to return to presence. Here are a few suggestions for how you might practise everyday mindfulness:
Place some coloured stickers around the house, as visual reminders to stop and feel the breath and/or body. You might decide to take a moment’s mindful pause before you open the front door, answer the phone, get out of bed, or turn on the computer.
Use waiting times as an opportunity to tune in to your mind, body and environment. Feel your feet on the ground and breathe (perhaps silently saying to yourself: two feet, one breath), noticing any sensations or thoughts that arise. Perhaps there’s an internal tightness or pressure, and thoughts of wanting to move faster. Could the experience of being ‘stuck’ in a queue or traffic jam be welcomed as a chance to be present and still? Might this transform the experience of being delayed?
Practise during routine activities. Mindful eating, driving, exercise and cleaning all become possible by being willing to experience with a friendly interest. Notice when you get caught in attempted multi-tasking: can you allow yourself to practise one activity at a time? What changes, if anything, when you do this?
Explore bringing mindfulness to your relationship with others. What happens when you listen, speak and act from a place of centredness? Or when you relate from a more fractured or distracted mind?
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Practice: STOP – a one-minute mindfulness practice
This simple and easy-to-remember practice takes a minute or so, offering an opportunity to shift into mindfulness at any point.
STOP whatever you’re doing (provided it’s safe to do so). Let go into being.
Take a few mindful breaths.
Open your attention to the body, and Observe the experience. What’s going on with you right now? Stay present and see for some moments.
Proceed with activity. Experiment with approaching it from a more mindful perspective.
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Week 9: practices to explore
Using any combination of the practices in this book, make a plan for how you’d like to engage with mindfulness over the next month. What you choose to do will depend on your schedule and motivation – be bold and realistic. Be interested in what happens as you carry out your plan. Set a date for re-evaluating the schedule.
Explore the further resources section in this book. What supports could you enlist for yourself? Could you commit to joining a mindfulness group, or checking in with mindful social media, or continuing your reading? Bring awareness to any tendency for reading to squeeze out the practice itself.
Consider what obstacles get in the way of mindfulness for you. These might include buying into busyness, anxiety, boredom, resistance or frustration. Do you experience ‘practice-interfering thoughts’ (the PITs) such as doubt about the value of meditation, or about whether you can sustain it, or perhaps that you don’t deserve the time or space, or that you can’t be bothered? Write down a list of your obstacles to mindfulness, toge
ther with some reminders of approaches and activities that help you stay connected. Pin it in a place where you can see it every day.
Write yourself a letter gently reminding yourself how you might think or feel in a time of stress or low mood. Suggest some nurturing activities that might help, or offer words of support. Seal it up and mark it for opening at a later date, when you feel in need of inspiration.
Choose a C of mindfulness to work with this week, following the guidance in chapter 2.
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Simon’s experience
Meditation practice keeps me in tune with my insides. I might have learned how to ride the ‘mindfulness bike’ but now I’ve got to keep my body fit and the machine oiled. It requires a bit of effort, but is it really an effort to ‘be’ for a while?
Mindfulness has helped with turning around my perspective. I’m 52 now and someone said to me the other day: ‘What’s it like being 52?’ I said: ‘The last two and a half years have been the happiest of my life.’ Looking at external circumstances, you wouldn’t say that those years have been massively different, but the way I’ve been perceiving them has been.
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Ann’s experience
Mindfulness is a lifetime’s work. Doing the course and practising has been a huge support and a tool to make changes. I feel it’s acted as a kind of conduit – it’s helped me to stop enabling other people and start enabling me. There’s been a shift – I’ve changed my relationship with myself.
Usually I do my practice at night using headphones – it helps me to sleep. I’ve got a few books and CDs and a mindfulness app. I have a variety so I can dip in and out of them. I don’t need that formal guidance so much now, as it’s much more of a habit, but I still go back to the audios to reinforce it, or I might read something.
It’s very subtle – by practising you realize you’ve started doing things more consciously. It doesn’t feel like I’m on a treadmill anymore. I’ve got some choices and control over what I do, more than before I started. I still have a few habits, but I recognize when I’m perpetuating them.
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Andy’s experience
I think mindfulness has made me stronger and more robust emotionally. It seems to nourish me, bringing a certain kind of discipline to my life. It calms my anxiety, and I feel lighter in spirit and better able to relate to other people, because I’m not so caught up in myself. These days I’m able to be with myself. It’s not doing anything hugely different from an outside perspective, but it feels very powerful on the inside. I’m glad I’ve got it in my toolbox.
I do a lot of mini-practices most days, like the breathing space. I use it in between seeing patients, to reset and ground myself, because my work as a psychologist can be quite hard. At the beginning I used CDs of the body scan but I tend to just sit in silence now and focus on the breath for 20 or 30 minutes. I also try to practise mindful swimming every other day, focusing on the breath; I like mindful walking too. We might say that we haven’t got time to fit it in, but how much time do we spend on Facebook, or in the pub?
Life throws us curveballs but most of it is what we’re doing to ourselves. Being able to understand that is a huge thing. If there are two key messages from mindfulness, one is being kind to yourself and the other is that it doesn’t always have to be this way. I spent most of my twenties and thirties not being very kind to myself, and I certainly wasn’t wise. I’m working on the wisdom and the kindness is getting easier.
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Catherine’s experience
I’m in a far better place now than at the beginning of the course. I’m much kinder to myself, and I don’t judge every single action. Mindfulness has been really good for me. At the same time it’s been difficult because it’s a habit that you need to put in your life – sometimes it’s hard to do that when you have young kids.
I go to follow-up practice sessions, which are really good because they’ve kept me connected. At home I used to listen to guided meditations but recently I’ve just sat down on my cushion and done it for myself – just noticing and feeling. I might practise mindfulness of sounds or breath or body, or do a loving-kindness meditation.
My husband says mindfulness has really changed me – I can deal with things better now. I’m calmer and able to react more authentically. I’m looking after myself in other ways too – improving my diet and taking physical exercise. Meditation and being mindful is a foundation for feeling good, alive, and for having energy.
I feel like it’s changed my life – I’ve been learning and reading about psychology and self-help for over a decade and a lot has helped, but mindfulness has been the thing that’s changed everything. I’m convinced I’ll be doing it in some form forever, because it’s been so useful.
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SUMMARY
With practice, we can realize habits of happiness, sustainable through the ups and downs of living.
As we enter onto a path of mindfulness – purposefully, attentively, and gently – we let go into a journey that naturally leads towards wellbeing.
There’s no need to try and improve ourselves – rather, we can let go into the mystery of who we are.
Meditation doesn’t have to be practised in stillness. Any movement can be mindful, if we bring awareness to it.
Automatic patterns of distraction and reacting are persistent. We can let go of getting to perfect mindfulness and instead work simply on bringing awareness to our lives through formal and informal practice.
Continuing to carve out a regular time and space for meditation seems to be important. We can also extend our practice to any situation, using life events themselves as an opportunity to be present.
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Recommended reading
There’s a vast selection of mindfulness-related books available. Here are a few suggestions for starters:
When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Pema Chödrön (Shambhala Publications, 1997)
I would recommend any and all of Pema Chödrön’s books, which present meditation from a Buddhist perspective in a way that’s accessible for all.
Full Catastrophe Living: How to Cope with Stress, Pain and Illness Using Mindfulness Meditation, Jon Kabat-Zinn (Piatkus, 2013)
Jon Kabat-Zinn developed the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course and is the pioneer in bringing mindfulness to mainstream settings. This book sets out the MBSR programme in depth. I would also highly recommend his Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life (Hyperion, 1994) and the accompanying audio CDs to his books, which are available from www.mindfulnesscds.com
A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life, Jack Kornfield (Bantam, 1993) Jack Kornfield has devoted his life to bringing Eastern wisdom to the West and presenting it in an accessible form. I would recommend any of his books.
Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World, Mark Williams, Danny Penman (Piatkus, 2011)
Mark Williams is one of the developers of the MBCT course, and here he sets it out for a general audience. Comes with a practice CD led by Mark.
The Mindful Manifesto: How Doing Less and Noticing More Can Help Us Thrive in a Stressed-Out World, Jonty Heaversedge, Ed Halliwell (Hay House, 2012)
Sets out the case for mindfulness as a vital practice for the 21st century.
Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace), Chade Meng Tan (HarperCollins, 2013)
A lively and straight-talking coursebook for the workplace mindfulness programme developed at Google.
Minding Closely: The Four Applications of Mindfulness, B. Alan Wallace (Snow Lion, 2011)
An insightful exploration of mindfulness from a Buddhist perspective, written by a foremost scholar, practitioner and scientist.
Further resources
‘Enlightenment is an accid
ent, but meditation practice makes you accident-prone.’
ZEN SAYINGS
There’s only so much mindfulness you can learn from a book, or on your own. It’s a bit like reading about playing the piano – interesting, perhaps, but you probably won’t develop your skills much. Without a teacher to guide you, and others to play alongside, the learning will be somewhat theoretical. Fortunately, there are a rapidly increasing number of ways that you can connect with mindfulness teachers and communities. Below are a few suggestions for developing your practice further.
Mindfulness courses
A gold standard mindfulness course is the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachussetts in the USA. It has been taught for over 35 years, and courses can be found all over the world. In the UK, a directory of MBSR courses can be found on the Be Mindful website (www.bemindful.co.uk), and you can also search for local providers.
Do check out the background and training of the person teaching – there’s currently no accreditation for mindfulness teachers, but there is a set of good practice guidelines for them to follow. You can find these at www.mindfulnessteachersuk.org.uk/pdf/teacher-guidelines.pdf.