So how can you put this time aside on a daily basis?
First, look on it as a time to be yourself and a time for yourself. You may find it difficult initially to find the time for your practice. One trick is to acknowledge that, in one sense, you do not have the spare time for this. You won’t find the time, you’ll have to make it. If you had a spare half hour each day, you’d have allocated it by now to other obligations. For these eight weeks, the commitment to this program may take some rearranging of your life. It can be very difficult to do this, even for two months, but it will need to be done or the practice will tend to get squeezed out by other, seemingly higher, priorities. You may find you have to rise a little earlier in the morning and, if you do so, you may then need to go to bed earlier, so that your practice is not done at the expense of your sleep. If you still feel that meditation will take up too much time, then try it as an experiment to see if you discover what others have reported—that it frees up more time than it uses—so that you find you are unexpectedly rewarded with more free time.
Secondly, we always remind those who participate in our classes that after they have settled on a time and a place for meditation, it’s important to be warm and comfortable, and to tell whoever needs to know what you are doing, so that they can deal with interruptions by visitors or by the telephone. If the telephone should ring and no one else is there to answer it, see if it is possible to allow it to ring, or for the call to be taken by voicemail. Similar interruptions can also arise from “the inside,” with thoughts of something you need to do—thoughts that seem to compel you to act now. If this happens, see if you can experiment with letting the ideas and plans come and go in your mind, rather than reacting instantly to them.
Lastly, it is important to remember that when you practice, you do not have to find it enjoyable (although many people do find it pleasant, but not in an obvious way). Follow the practices day by day, until this becomes a routine, although what you’ll discover when you come to the practices is that they are never routine. You are only responsible for what you put into it. The outcome will be unique to you. None of us can tell in advance what there is to be discovered in the present moment, and what peace or freedom you will feel when it begins to reveal itself to you.
What will you need in the way of equipment?
You’ll need an MP3 player, a room or place to sit where you will be undisturbed, a mat or a thick rug to lie on, a chair or stool or cushion for sitting, a blanket to keep you warm and a pencil or pen to keep a note of specific things from time to time.
A word of caution
Before you start, it’s important to know that as you move through the program there will be countless occasions when you’ll feel like you’ve failed. Your mind will refuse to settle. It will race off like a greyhound after a hare. No matter what you try, within seconds your mind may become a cauldron of bubbling thoughts. It may feel like you are wrestling a snake. You may even want to put your head in your hands in despair at ever achieving a calm state of mind. Or you may feel sleepy, and a deep drowsiness will begin undermining your intention to stay awake. You may find yourself thinking, Nothing is working for me.
But these moments are not signs of failure. They are profoundly important. Like trying anything new, whether it’s learning to paint or to dance, it can be frustrating when the results do not correspond to the picture you have in your mind. In these moments, it pays to persist with commitment and kindness toward yourself. Apparent “failures” are where you will learn the most. The act of “seeing” that your mind has raced off, or that you are restless or drowsy, is a moment of great learning. You are coming to understand a profound truth: that your mind has a mind of its own and that a body has needs that many of us ignore for too long. You will gradually come to learn that your thoughts are not you—you do not have to take them so personally. You can simply watch these states of mind as they arise, stay a while, and then dissolve. It’s tremendously liberating to realize that your thoughts are not “real” or “reality.” They are simply mental events. They are not “you.”
At the very moment when you realize this, the patterns of thoughts and feelings that gripped you may suddenly lose momentum and allow the mind to settle. A deep feeling of contentment may fill your body. But very soon your mind will race off again. After a while, you will once again become aware that you are thinking, comparing, judging. You may now feel disappointed. You might think: I thought I really had it then—now I’ve lost it … Once again, you will realize that your mind is like the sea. It is never still. Its waves rise up and down. Your mind may then once again settle … at least for a while. Gradually, the periods of calm tranquility will lengthen and the time it takes for you to realize that your mind has raced off will shorten. Even the disappointment can be recognized as another state of mind. Here now, then gone …
… until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents, and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
W. H. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition, 1951
Throughout the following eight chapters, it may sometimes feel as if the essence of what we are trying to convey is shrouded in mist. You may feel that you’re not “getting it.” This is because many of the concepts and much of the wisdom to be gained from meditation is simply inexpressible in any language. You simply have to do the practices and learn for yourself. If you do, then every now and again, you will have an “Aha” moment—a flicker of insight that is profoundly calming and enlightening. You will understand what other practitioners have been learning for thousands of years: that worries, stresses and anxieties can be held in a larger space, in which they emerge and dissolve, leaving you to rest in awareness itself—it’s a sense of being complete and whole that is independent of your preconceptions. At the end of the eight-week program, many people report knowing, deep within themselves, that this feeling of profound stillness, of being happy, content and free, is always available to them—it is only ever a breath away.
We wish you well as you start along this path.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mindfulness Week One: Waking Up to the Autopilot
One evening, Alex trudged slowly up the stairs to his bedroom. He was still mulling over his day’s work as he undressed and put on his nightclothes. His thoughts hopped from subject to subject. Soon, they’d latched on to a job he needed to do out of town the following afternoon, before dithering over the best way to get there by car to avoid the roadwork. The car! He remembered that his car insurance was due for renewal. He’d use his credit card tomorrow. The card! Had he remembered to pay his credit-card bill? He thought so. He remembered the printed bill with items reserving hotel rooms for next July’s big event. Before he’d even realized it, he was thinking of his daughter’s upcoming wedding.
“Alex,” shouted his wife. “Are you ready yet? We’re all waiting and it’s time to go.”
With a start, Alex realized he’d gone upstairs to change for a party, not for bed.
Alex isn’t suffering from dementia, nor does he have a particularly poor memory. He’d simply been on “automatic pilot,” his mind having been hijacked by his current concerns. It’s a problem we’re all familiar with. Have you ever set off for a friend’s house, only to find yourself taking the road to work instead? Or started peeling potatoes, only to realize that you’d intended to cook rice this evening? Habits are frighteningly subtle,
yet can be incredibly powerful. Without warning, they can seize control of your life and drive you in a direction totally different from that you’d intended. It’s almost as if the mind is in one place and the body in another.
Psychologist Daniel Simons has done many experiments that illustrate the extent to which we miss seemingly obvious things through automatically paying attention elsewhere. In one study, he set up an experiment in which an actor stopped an ordinary person in the street and asked for directions.1 As the person was giving the directions, two people carrying a door rudely barged between them. At the moment the person’s view was blocked by the door, the actor asking for directions was switched with another. The new actor looked totally different. His jacket was of a different style and color. He wasn’t wearing a sweater, nor did he have a crew cut. He even sounded completely different. Despite all this, only around half of the people questioned actually noticed the switch. This shows just how easily we can be absorbed in our busyness—and how powerful the side effects can be. It’s almost as if our minds are purged of consciousness, leaving the autopilot in full control.
Our autopilot may be inconvenient, but it’s not a mistake. Even though it can let us down at unexpected moments, it remains one of humanity’s greatest evolutionary assets. It allows us to sidestep temporarily a shortcoming that all animals share—namely, that we can only truly concentrate on one thing at a time or, at best, pay intermittent attention to a small number of things. Our minds have a bottleneck in the so-called “working memory” that allows us to keep only a few simple things in them at any one time. That’s one of the reasons why telephone numbers traditionally had only seven digits (plus the area code). As soon as you exceed this threshold, items tend to be forgotten. One thought seems to drive out another.
If there’s too much information sloshing around in the mind, your working memory begins to overflow. You begin to feel stressed. Life starts to trickle through your fingers. You begin to feel powerless and your mind starts periodically “freezing,” making you indecisive and increasingly unaware of what’s going on around you. You become forgetful, exhausted and at your wits’ end. It’s similar to the way a computer gets slower and slower as you open more and more windows. At first, you don’t notice the impact but, gradually, once you cross an invisible threshold, the computer becomes ever more sluggish, until it freezes—before finally crashing.
In the short term, the automatic pilot allows us to extend the working memory by creating habits. If we repeat something more than a couple of times, the mind links together all of the actions needed to complete a task in a brilliantly seamless manner. Many of the tasks we carry out each day are phenomenally complex, requiring the coordination of dozens of muscles and the firing of thousands of nerves. But they can all be linked together using a habit that consumes only a small part of your brainpower (and an even smaller proportion of your awareness). The brain can daisy-chain such habits together to carry out long, complex tasks with very little input from the conscious mind at all. For example, if you learned to drive in a car with manual gears, you probably found it very difficult to change gears at first, but now you can do it without thinking. As your driving abilities grew, you learned to carry out simultaneously many of the tricky tasks that you now take for granted. So you can now effortlessly change gears and hold a conversation at the same time. All are daisy chained habits coordinated by your autopilot.
Mindfulness and your autopilot
* * *
Have you ever turned on your computer to send an email, only to get lured into answering some others, and then turned your computer off again an hour later without sending the original message?
This is not what you had intended to do. But notice the consequence: when you next turn on your computer, you’ll still have to send your original message, and you will also have to look at all the new messages in response to that one hour of unscheduled work.
When this happens, you may think you are doing a good job—just “clearing the decks”—but what you’ve actually done is to make the email system speed up a notch!
Mindfulness does not say, “Don’t send emails,” but it may remind you to check in with yourself and ask, “Is this what I had intended to be doing?”
* * *
If you are fully aware, then you maintain greater control of your automatic pilot and can use it to deploy habits as you need them. For example, come 5:30 p.m. you might engage in the “end-of-theworkday” habits, such as a final check of your emails, closing down the computer and a quick rummage through your bag to ensure that you’ve got your keys, phone and wallet or purse. At the same time, you might continue an engrossing conversation with a colleague, while thinking about what to have for dinner. But you can very easily lose conscious control of your automatic pilot. One habit can end up triggering the next, which triggers the next … and the next. For example, you might go home after work out of habit and forget to meet a friend for a drink. In so many seemingly small ways, habits can, surreptitiously, take control of your life.
As the years pass, this can become a huge problem as you cede more and more control of your life to the autopilot—including much of what you think. Habits trigger thoughts, which trigger more thoughts, which end up triggering yet more habitual thoughts. Fragments of negative thoughts and feelings can form themselves into patterns that amplify your emotions. Before you know it, you can become overwhelmed by deep-seated stresses, anxieties and sadnesses. And by the time you’ve noticed the unwanted thoughts and feelings, they’ll have become too strong to contain. A “thoughtless” comment by a friend can leave you feeling unhappy and insecure. A driver who cuts in front of you can tip you over the edge into irritability and anger. You can be left feeling exhausted, frantic and cynically disconnected from the world. Then you might feel guilty about your loss of control. Another twist of the downward spiral has begun …
You may desperately try and head off the spiral of stress by trying to suppress it. You might try arguing with yourself, telling yourself: I’m stupid for feeling like this. But such thinking about thoughts, feelings and emotions simply makes them worse. Very soon the autopilot can become overloaded with too many thoughts, memories, anxieties and tasks—just like a computer with too many windows left open. Your mind slows down. You may become exhausted, anxious, frantic and chronically dissatisfied with life. And again, just like a computer, you may freeze—or even crash.
When you reach the point where such overload has seized up the conscious mind, it’s very difficult to reverse the process simply by thinking your way out, for this is like opening yet another program on the computer, overlayering it with yet another window. Instead, you need to find a way of stepping outside the cycle almost as soon as you notice it’s begun. This is the first step in learning to deal with life more skillfully. It involves training yourself to notice when your autopilot is taking over, so that you can then make a choice about what you want your mind to be focusing upon. You need to learn to close down some of the “programs” that have been left running in the background of your mind. The first stage of regaining your innate mindfulness involves returning to basics. You need to relearn how to focus your awareness on one thing at a time.
Do you remember the Chocolate meditation from Chapter Three (see p. 55)? Now you can explore this further by doing a similar exercise in mindful eating. The Raisin meditation (opposite page) is a more subtle version of eating chocolate mindfully. You may find that paying very close attention to what you’re eating will change the experience in quite unexpected ways.
You only need do this practice once, but you can obviously do it as many times as you wish. It’s a sampler, as it were. After you’ve carried it out, you have started the mindfulness meditation program.
* * *
The Raisin meditation2
Set aside five to ten minutes when you can be alone, in a place, and at a time, when you will not be disturbed by the phone, family or friends. Switch off your cell phone, so it doesn’t p
lay on your mind. You will need a few raisins (or other dried fruit or small nuts). You’ll also need a piece of paper and a pen to record your reactions afterward. Your task will be to eat the fruit or nuts in a mindful way, much as you ate the chocolate earlier (see p. 55).
Read the instructions below to get an idea of what’s required, and only reread them if you really need to. The spirit in which you do the meditation is more important than covering every instruction in minute detail. You should spend about twenty to thirty seconds on each of the following eight stages:
1. Holding
Take one of the raisins (or your choice of dried fruit or nuts) and hold it in the palm of your hand, or between your fingers and thumb. Focusing on it, approach it as if you have never seen anything like it before. Can you feel the weight of it in your hand? Is it casting a shadow on your palm?
2. Seeing
Take the time really to see the raisin. Imagine you have never seen one before. Look at it with great care and full attention. Let your eyes explore every part of it. Examine the highlights where the light shines; the darker hollows, the folds and ridges.
Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World Page 7