Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World

by Williams, Mark

  Meditation and physical health

  Numerous recent clinical trials have shown that meditation can have a profoundly positive effect on physical health. One study, funded by the US National Institutes of Health and published in 2005, discovered that the form of meditation that has been practiced in the West since the 1960s (Transcendental Meditation) leads to a massive reduction in mortality. Compared with controls, the meditation group showed a 23 percent decrease in mortality over the nineteen-year period that the group was studied. There was a 30 percent decrease in the rate of cardiovascular mortality and also a large decrease in the rate of mortality due to cancer in the meditation group compared with combined controls.15 This effect is equivalent to discovering an entirely new class of drugs (but without the inevitable side effects).

  Meditation and depression

  Research has shown that an eight-week mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) course—which lies at the heart of the program in this book and was developed by Mark Williams and colleagues—significantly reduces the chances of suffering depression. In fact, it reduces the likelihood of relapse by about 40 to 50 percent in people who have suffered three or more previous episodes of depression.16 This is the first demonstration that a psychological treatment for depression, taught while people are still well, can actually prevent relapse. In the UK, the government’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has now recommended MBCT for those with a history of three or more episodes of depression in their Guidelines for Management of Depression (2004, 2009). Research by Maura Kenny in Adelaide and Stuart Eisendrath in San Francisco has also suggested that MBCT may be an effective strategy for those whose depression is not responding to other approaches, such as antidepressant medication or cognitive therapy.17

  Meditation versus antidepressants

  We are often asked whether mindfulness can be used alongside antidepressants or instead of them. The answer to both questions is yes. Research from Professor Kees van Heeringen’s clinic in Ghent, Belgium, suggests that mindfulness can be used while people are still on medication. It was found that mindfulness reduced the chances of relapse from 68 percent to 30 percent even though the majority (a similar proportion in both MBCT and control groups) were taking antidepressants.18 With regard to the question of whether meditation can be an alternative to medication, Willem Kuyken and colleagues in Exeter and Zindel Segal and colleagues in Toronto19 showed that people who came off their antidepressants and did an eight-week course of MBCT instead, did as well or better than those who stayed on their medication.

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  Mindfulness and resilience

  Mindfulness has been found to boost resilience—that is, the ability to withstand life’s knocks and setbacks—to quite a remarkable degree. Hardiness varies hugely from person to person. Some people thrive on stressful challenges that may daunt many others, whether these involve meeting ever increasing work performance targets, trekking to the South Pole or being able to cope with three kids, a stressful job and mortgage payments.

  What is it that makes “hardy” people able to cope where others might wilt? Dr. Suzanne Kobasa at City University of New York narrowed the field down to three psychological traits that she termed control, commitment and challenge. Another eminent psychologist, Dr. Aaron Antonovsky, an Israeli medical sociologist, has also attempted to pin down the key psychological traits that allowed some to withstand extreme stress while others did not. He focused on Holocaust survivors and narrowed the search down to three traits that together add to having a sense of coherence: comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness. So “hardy” people have a belief that their situation has inherent meaning that they can commit themselves to, that they can manage their life and that their situation is understandable—that it is basically comprehensible, even if it seems chaotic and out of control.

  To a large degree, all of the traits identified by both Kobasa and Antonovsky govern how resilient we are. Generally speaking, the higher you score on their scales the more able you are to cope with life’s trials and tribulations.

  As part of their ongoing evaluation of the impact of their eight-week mindfulness training course, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s team at the University of Massachusetts Medical School decided to see whether meditation could boost these scores and thereby enhance hardiness. And the results were very clear cut. In general, not only did the participants feel happier, more energized and less stressed, they also felt that they had far more control over their lives. They found that their lives had more meaning and that challenges should be seen as opportunities rather than threats. Other studies have replicated this finding.20

  But perhaps most intriguing of all is the realization that these “fundamental” character traits are not unchangeable after all. They can be changed for the better by just eight weeks of mindfulness training. And these transformations should not be underestimated because they can have huge significance for our day-to-day lives. While empathy, compassion and inner serenity are vital for overall well-being, a certain degree of hardiness is required too. And the cultivation of mindfulness can have a dramatic impact on these crucial aspects of our lives.

  These hard-won findings of research from laboratories and clinics all over the world have profound implications. They are changing the way scientists think about the mind and allow us to have confidence in the experiences of the countless thousands of people who have discovered the benefits of mindfulness for themselves. Again and again, people tell us that mindful awareness greatly enhances the joys of daily life. In practice, even the smallest of things can suddenly become captivating again. For this reason, one of our favorite practices is the Chocolate meditation (see the opposite page). In this you are asked to attend actively to some chocolate as you eat it. Why not do this one right now, before you start the main eight-week program? You’ll be astonished at what you discover.

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  The Chocolate meditation

  Choose some chocolate—either a type that you’ve never tried before or one that you have not eaten recently. It might be dark and flavorsome, organic or fair-trade or whatever you choose. The important thing is to choose a type you wouldn’t normally eat or that you consume only rarely. Here goes:

  Open the packet. Inhale the aroma. Let it sweep over you.

  Break off a piece and look at it. Really let your eyes drink in what it looks like, examining every nook and cranny.

  Pop it in your mouth. See if it’s possible to hold it on your tongue and let it melt, noticing any tendency to suck at it. Chocolate has over three hundred different flavors. See if you can sense some of them.

  If you notice your mind wandering while you do this, simply notice where it went, then gently escort it back to the present moment.

  After the chocolate has completely melted, swallow it very slowly and deliberately. Let it trickle down your throat.

  Repeat this with the next piece.

  How do you feel? Is it different from normal? Did the chocolate taste better than if you’d just eaten it at a normal breakneck pace?

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  CHAPTER FOUR

  Introducing the Eight-Week Mindfulness Program

  The remaining chapters of this book show you how to gradually settle your mind and enhance your natural happiness and contentment using mindfulness meditation. It will take you along a path that countless philosophers and practitioners have trodden in the past; a path that the latest scientific advances show really does dissipate anxiety, stress, unhappiness and feelings of exhaustion.

  Each of the remaining eight chapters has two elements: the first is a meditation (or series of shorter meditations) that you will be asked to do for a total of around twenty to thirty minutes per day, using the audio files found at http://bit.ly/rodalemindfulness; the second is a “Habit Releaser,” which gently breaks down ingrained habits. These Habit Releasers are designed to reignite your innate curiosity and are generally fun to do. They include such things as going to the movies and choo
sing a film at random or changing the chair you normally sit on at meetings. You’ll be asked to do these tasks mindfully, with your full attention. This may sound frivolous, but these things can be very effective at breaking down the habits that can trap you in negative ways of thinking. Habit Releasers snap you out of a rut and can give you new avenues of life to explore. You’ll be asked to carry out one each week.

  Each meditation practice should, ideally, be carried out on six days out of seven. If, for whatever reason, you can’t manage six sessions in any given week, you can simply roll over the practice and carry it out for a further week. Alternatively, if you’ve only missed a few sessions you can move on to the next week’s practice. The choice will be left up to you. It is not essential that you carry out the course in eight weeks, but it is important that you complete the program if you want to gain the maximum benefit and fully taste what mindfulness might offer you.

  For clarity, in each chapter we have highlighted the “practices of the week” in a separate box. This makes it easy for you to read the whole book before embarking on the eight-week program should you choose to do so. If you take this approach, it would then be best if you reread the appropriate chapter when it’s time for you to carry out the allotted meditation, so you can understand the aims and intentions of each practice.

  For the first four weeks of the program, the emphasis is on learning to pay open-hearted attention to different aspects of the internal and external world. You’ll also learn how to use the “Three-Minute Breathing Space” meditation (see p. 130) to ground yourself through the day, or whenever you feel that life is running away with you. It helps to consolidate the things that you learn during the longer formal practices. Many of those around the world who’ve completed our mindfulness courses say that it’s the most important skill they’ve ever learned for regaining control over their lives.

  A week-by-week summary of the program

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  Week One helps you to see the automatic pilot at work and encourages you to explore what happens when you “wake up.” Central to this week is a Body and Breath meditation that stabilizes the mind and helps you to see what unfolds when you focus your full awareness on just one thing at a time. Another shorter meditation helps you to reconnect with your senses through mindful eating. Although both practices are very simple, they also provide the essential foundations on which all the other meditations are built.

  Week Two uses a simple Body Scan meditation to help explore the difference between thinking about a sensation and experiencing it. Many of us spend so much of our time living “in our heads” that we almost forget about the world experienced directly through our senses. The Body Scan meditation helps to train your mind so that you can focus your attention directly on your bodily sensations without judging or analyzing what you find. This helps you to see, ever more clearly, when the mind has begun to wander away by itself, so that you gradually learn to “taste” the difference between the “thinking mind” and the “sensing mind.”

  Week Three builds on the previous sessions with some nonstrenuous Mindful Movement practices based on yoga. The movements, even though they are not difficult in themselves, allow you to see more clearly what your mental and physical limits are, and how you react when you reach them. They help the mind to continue the process of reintegrating with the body. You’ll gradually learn that the body is exquisitely sensitive to emerging unsettling feelings when you are becoming too goal-focused—and this allows you to see how tense, angry or unhappy you become when things don’t turn out the way you want. It’s an early warning system of profound power and significance that allows you to head off problems before they gain unstoppable momentum.

  Week Four introduces a Sounds and Thoughts meditation that progressively reveals how you can be sucked unwittingly into “overthinking.” You’ll learn to see your thoughts as mental events that come and go just like sounds. By meditating on the sounds around you, you’ll come to learn that “the mind is to thought what the ear is to sound.” This helps you to take a “decentered” stance to your thoughts and feelings, seeing them come and go in the space of awareness. This will enhance clarity of awareness and encourage you to take a different perspective on your busyness and troubles.

  Week Five introduces a meditation—Exploring Difficulty—that helps you to face (rather than avoid) the difficulties that arise in your life from time to time. Many of life’s problems can be left to resolve themselves, but some need to be faced with a spirit of openness, curiosity and compassion. If you don’t embrace such difficulties, then they can increasingly blight your life.

  Week Six develops this process even further, exploring how negative ways of thinking gradually dissipate when you actively cultivate loving-kindness and compassion through a Befriending Meditation and acts of generosity in daily life. Cultivating friendship towards yourself, including for what you see as your “failures” and “inadequacies,” is the cornerstone of finding peace in a frantic world.

  Week Seven explores the close connection between our daily routines, activities, behavior and moods. When we are stressed and exhausted, we often give up the things that “nourish” us to make time for the more “pressing” and “important” things. We try to clear the decks. Week Seven focuses on using meditation to help you make increasingly skillful choices, so that you can do more of the things that nourish you, and limit the downsides of those things that drain and deplete your inner resources. This will help you to enter a virtuous circle that leads to greater creativity, resilience and the ability to enjoy life spontaneously as it is, rather than how you wish it to be. Anxieties, stresses and worries will still come, but they are more likely to melt away as you learn to meet them with kindness.

  Week Eight helps you to weave mindfulness into your daily life, so that it’s always there when you need it the most.

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  The remaining four weeks of the program build on this work, giving you more practical ways to see thoughts as mental events—like clouds in the sky—and helping you to cultivate an attitude of acceptance, compassion and empathy toward yourself and others. And, from this state of mind, all else follows.

  During the eight weeks of the program we deliberately place each dimension of the mindful Being mode (outlined in Chapter Three) in the foreground, so that you learn progressively, at the deepest of levels, what happens when you wake up to your life. Although it seems as if each week is teaching a different aspect of mindfulness, they are, in fact, all interrelated. As we said on p. 44, a shift in one dimension brings about a shift in the others as well. This is why you will be invited to do many different practices and to persist with each one for at least a week—for each of them provides a different gateway into awareness, and no one can say which, for you, at this point in your life, will be most helpful in helping you reconnect with what is deepest and wisest within you.

  Habit Releasers

  The Habit Releasers you’ll be asked to carry out each week are based on beautifully simple practices that, as their name suggests, break down the habits that can trap you in negative ways of thinking. They snap you out of your old careworn ruts and give you exciting new avenues to explore. They exploit another understanding that you’ll gain from meditation—that it’s difficult to be curious and unhappy at the same time. Reigniting your innate human curiosity is a wonderful way of dealing skillfully with the frantic world in which we so often live. You’ll soon discover that although you feel time-poor, you are actually moment-rich.

  Setting up a time and space for meditation

  Before you embark on the mindfulness program, spend a moment considering how to prepare yourself. The best way to approach the program is to set aside an eight-week period when you can commit yourself to spending some time each day doing the meditations and other practices. Each step of the program introduces new elements to the practice, so that over the eight weeks you are able to deepen your learning day by day.

  It is important to take your time w
ith the practices, and to follow the instructions as best you can, even if it feels difficult, boring or repetitive. In much of our lives, if we do not like something, we are tempted to rush on to something else, but this program is suggesting a different approach: to use your restless and churning mind as an opportunity to look more deeply into it, rather than as an immediate reason to conclude that the meditation is “not working.” See if it’s possible to keep in mind that the intention is not to strive for a goal. You are not even striving to relax, strange as this may sound. Relaxation, peace and contentment are the by-products of the work you are doing, not its goal.