The Breathing Space meditation concentrates the core elements of the Mindfulness program into three steps of roughly one minute each. During Week Three of this course, we suggest that you practice the Breathing Space twice a day. It’s up to you when you do it, but it makes sense to find regular times each day to set aside and stick to them, so that this becomes part of your daily routine. You may wish to do the actual practice while listening to the audio files at http://bit.ly/rodalemindfulness (track 8), at least for the first few times that you do it, but then feel free to do it on your own, silently guiding your own practice for about three minutes, keeping the three-step structure. It’s also worth reading the printed version of the meditation detailed on the following page, so you can familiarize yourself with its hourglass pattern.
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Three-Minute Breathing Space meditation
Step 1: Becoming aware
Deliberately adopt an erect and dignified posture, whether sitting or standing. If possible, close your eyes. Then bring your awareness to your inner experience and acknowledge it, asking: what is my experience right now?
What thoughts are going through the mind? As best you can, acknowledge thoughts as mental events.
What feelings are here? Turn toward any sense of discomfort or unpleasant feelings, acknowledging them without trying to make them different from how you find them.
What body sensations are here right now? Perhaps quickly scan the body to pick up any sensations of tightness or bracing, acknowledging the sensations, but, once again, not trying to change them in any way.
Step 2: Gathering and focusing attention
Now, redirecting the attention to a narrow “spotlight” on the physical sensations of the breath, move in close to the physical sensations of the breath in the abdomen … expanding as the breath comes in … and falling back as the breath goes out. Follow the breath all the way in and all the way out. Use each breath as an opportunity to anchor yourself into the present. And if the mind wanders, gently escort the attention back to the breath.
Step 3: Expanding attention
Now, expand the field of awareness around the breathing so that it includes a sense of the body as a whole, your posture and facial expression, as if the whole body was breathing. If you become aware of any sensations of discomfort or tension, feel free to bring your focus of attention right in to the intensity by imagining that the breath could move into and around the sensations. In this, you are helping to explore the sensations, befriending them, rather than trying to change them in any way. If they stop pulling for your attention, return to sitting, aware of the whole body, moment by moment.
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The hourglass shape of the Breathing Space
It is helpful to view your awareness during the Breathing Space as forming the shape of an hourglass. The wide opening at the top of an hourglass is like the first step of the Breathing Space. In this, you open your attention and gently acknowledge whatever is entering and leaving awareness. This allows you to see if you are entangled in the Doing mode of mind, and if so, to disengage yourself from it and shift into the full awareness of the Being mode. In doing so, you are gently reminding yourself that your current state of mind is not a solid “fact,” but is instead governed by interlinked thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and impulses to act. These can, and do, ebb and flow, and you can become aware of them as they do so.
The second step of the Breathing Space is like the narrowing of the hourglass’s neck. It’s where you focus your attention on the breath in the lower abdomen. You focus on the physical sensations of breathing, gently coaxing the mind back to the breath when it wanders away. This helps to anchor the mind—grounding you back in the present moment.
The third step of the Breathing Space is like the broadening base of an hourglass. In this, you open your awareness. In this opening, you are opening to life as it is, preparing yourself for the next moments of your day. Here you are, gently but firmly, reaffirming a sense that you have a place in the world—your whole mind-body, just as it is, in all its peace, dignity and completeness.
Habit Releaser: valuing the television
Watching TV can be a particularly potent habit, so you can easily take it for granted and stop valuing it. It’s all too easy to come home from work, sit down, turn on the TV and watch it. And watch it. And watch it … You may feel that there are more interesting things to do, but somehow you just can’t bring yourself to do them. You may then start criticizing yourself for watching. You may tell yourself how bad you are for slumping comatose in front of the TV when you could be doing something worthwhile.
Can you make the TV more valuable, and respect it more than you do?
One day this week, see about getting a weekly TV schedule, or looking it up online, to see what program you’d really like to watch: ones that are interesting or enjoyable or both. (Note: if you don’t have a TV, then carry out this habit releaser with the radio, or other form of entertainment that you may have come to take for granted.) On your designated day, only watch the program that you have actually chosen to watch and consciously switch off the TV for the times in between. You could read a book or newspaper, phone a friend or relative you haven’t spoken to for a while, or perhaps catch up with a few minutes of gardening. You could even do an extra eight-minute session of meditation (or make up for one you’ve missed out on).
Remember consciously to switch off the television as soon as the chosen program has finished, turning it on again later if there is something else that you particularly want to watch. At the end of the evening, record in a notebook how it went: not only whether it felt good or bad, but what you noticed. What thoughts, feelings, body sensations and impulses were around? Remember that the intention is to help dissolve old habits that have often grown up slowly over many, many years, so don’t expect miracles. But if, as a result of any of the practices you undertake this week, you catch a glimpse of another, freer way of living your life, you may be taking the first step to discovering something new: that you don’t have to change much of what you do from day to day, but instead learn to do the same things differently; to surround your tasks with the fresh air of awareness and choice.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mindfulness Week Four: Moving Beyond the Rumor Mill
John was on his way to school.
He was worried about the math lesson.
He was not sure he could control the class again today.
It was not part of a janitor’s duty.1
What did you notice when you read these sentences? Most people find that they repeatedly update their view of the scene in their mind’s eye. First of all, they see a little boy winding his way to school and worrying about his math lesson. Then they’re forced to update the scene as the little boy changes into a teacher, before finally morphing into a janitor.
This example illustrates how the mind is continuously working “behind the scenes” to build a picture of the world as best it can. We never see a scene in photographic detail, but instead make inferences based on the “facts” that we are given. The mind elaborates on the details, judging them, fitting them with past experience, anticipating how they’ll be in the future and attaching meaning to them. It’s a fantastically elaborate mental juggling act. And this whole process is run and rerun every time we read a magazine, recall a memory, engage in conversation or anticipate the future. As a result, events seen in the mind’s eye can end up differing wildly from person to person and from any objective “reality”: we don’t see the world as it is, but as we are.
We are constantly making guesses about the world—and we’re barely conscious of it. We only notice it when someone comes along and plays a trick on us, as in the John scenario. Then our running commentary on life is laid bare and evaporates—before reformulating itself seamlessly into a new one. Often we’re not even aware of the shift. Or, if we are, it gives us a little shiver of vertigo, as if the world imperceptibly shifted beneath our feet. And, if you’re lucky, it wi
ll make you laugh out loud—this sudden shifting of perspective is how many jokes work.
The way we interpret the world makes a huge difference to how we react. This is sometimes called the ABC model of emotions. The “A” represents the situation itself—what a video camera would record. The “B” is the interpretation given to the scene; the running story we create out of the situation, which often flows just beneath the surface of awareness but is taken as fact. The “C” is our reactions: our emotions, body sensations and our impulses to act in various ways.
Often, we see the “A” and “C” quite clearly, but we are not aware of the “B.” We think that the situation itself aroused our feelings and emotions when, in fact, it was our interpretation of the scene that did this. It’s as if the world were a silent film on which we write our own commentary. But the commentary, with its explanations of what is going on, happens so fast that we take it to be part of the film. It can become progressively more difficult to separate the “real” facts of a situation from its interpretation. And once such a propaganda stream has begun, it can be more and more difficult to argue against it. All future events will be interpreted to support the status quo; competing information is ignored and supporting facts wholeheartedly embraced.
The mind’s running commentary on the world is like a rumor. It might be true, it might only be partially true—or it might be completely wrong. Unfortunately, the mind often finds it very difficult to detect the difference between fact and fiction once it has begun to construct a mental model of the world. For these reasons, rumors can be incredibly powerful and derail not just the minds of individuals but of whole societies.
There are few better illustrations of how powerful rumors can be, and how difficult they can be to stop, than the US military’s “psychological operations” during the Second World War. During that time, many bizarre and surreal rumors would spread like wildfire across America, often without any foundation or logic at all. For example, claims such as, “The Russians get most of our butter and just use it for greasing their guns,” or “The Navy has dumped three carloads of coffee into New York harbor” would appear as if from nowhere and begin to sap morale.
The American government was desperate to scotch such rumors as soon as they appeared and tried all kinds of perfectly reasonable and logical approaches.2 One of their first tactics was to broadcast special radio programs where they’d take a rumor, discuss it and try to quash it. This soon revealed another problem, in that many listeners would retune their radios partway through a program, so they’d hear only the rumor and not its debunking. This obviously helped to spread the rumors even more.
Next, the government set up special “rumor clinics” in newspapers, where experts would take a rumor and refute it by explaining its psychological underpinnings—how, for example, it represented a form of “self-defense” or a “mental projection.” A major problem with this approach soon surfaced too: the experts in the “rumor clinics” often had very little evidence on which to build a case, largely because you can’t prove a negative. Quite often, they ended up making things far worse because they would simply dismiss the rumors as nonsense and say that the true facts were “a military secret.”
They were up against another major problem too: we often give far more credence to emotionally charged stories than to logic—no matter how rational the arguments.
In many ways, the study of rumors is the study of our minds because: our thoughts are like rumors in the mind. They might be true, but then again, they might not be.
In retrospect, we can see how both of the above approaches to debunking wartime rumors were doomed to failure—yet we repeatedly adopt the same techniques when we try to quash the rumors in our own minds. Take self-criticism as an example: when we are feeling stressed or vulnerable, we only hear the inner critic and not the quieter voice of compassion. If we do hear an alternative to the unsettling thoughts, we probably won’t believe the answers because the emotional punch behind the thoughts is so powerful that it overwhelms all of our logic. If we dismiss our thoughts as “nonsense” or tell ourselves to “get a grip” or to “pull yourself together” then this further lowers our morale, leaving us wide open to further feelings of weakness and inadequacy. To make matters even worse, every time the tape of self-criticism begins to roll, we immediately start embellishing the story. We begin trawling our minds for supporting evidence and ignore everything to the contrary.
Is it any wonder then, that the rumor mill in our minds can cause us so much unnecessary suffering? Is it so surprising that all of the ways in which we try to quench those rumors only end up making things far, far worse?
Instead of confronting the mind’s rumor mill with logic and “positive thinking,” it makes far more sense to step outside the endless cycle and just watch the thoughts unfold in all their fevered beauty. But this can be difficult. If you look closely at the “rumors” that start washing around the mind when you feel stressed, you’ll see how much a part of you they really appear to be. They carry quite a punch and may be central to what you believe about yourself and the situation in which you find yourself.
Have a look at the following list of common thoughts that pop into people’s heads when they feel frantic, stressed, unhappy or exhausted (taken from a questionnaire compiled by one of our colleagues, meditation teacher Hugh Poulton):
I can’t enjoy myself without thinking about what needs to be done.
I must never fail.
Why can’t I relax?
I must never let people down.
It’s up to me.
I must be strong.
Everyone relies on me.
I’m the only one who can do this.
I can’t stand this any more.
I mustn’t waste a minute.
I wish I were somewhere else.
Why don’t they just do it?
Why am I not enjoying this any more?
What’s the matter with me?
I can’t give up.
Something has to change.
There must be something wrong with me.
Everything will fall apart without me.
Why can’t I switch off?
When we feel stressed and life is frantic, thoughts like these often feel like the absolute truth about us and the world. But they are, in fact, symptoms of stress, just as a high temperature is a symptom of flu.
As you get more stressed, you believe more strongly in thoughts such as, I’m the only one who can do this. And with loaded thoughts like this, which is in effect saying that you and only you are responsible if things go wrong, then is it any wonder that your mind reacts and wants to find an escape route? You just want to be released from the pressure, so thoughts such as, I wish I could just disappear, follow swiftly along behind.
Becoming aware that these thoughts are symptoms of stress and exhaustion, rather than facts that must be true, allows you to step back from them. And this grants you the space to decide whether to take them seriously or not. In time, through mindfulness practice, you can learn to notice them, acknowledge their presence and let them go. Week Four of the Mindfulness program will show you how to do this.
Exposing the rumor mill
The first three weeks of the program have been designed to train the mind, while laying the foundations foreveryday mindfulness—the flavor of awareness that allows you to be truly present in the world, rather than simply drifting through it on autopilot. Week Four of the program refines this process by enhancing your ability to sense when your mind and body are signaling that things are turning negative and self-attacking, times when your reactions are pulling you into their vortex. Of course, sensing when your thoughts and feelings are turning against you is one thing; preventing them from gaining unstoppable momentum is quite another. So, Week Four gives you a powerful new tool—the Sounds and Thoughts meditation—to help you.
Practices for Week Four
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An eight-minute Breath and Body meditation (
see p. 127, online at http://bit.ly/rodalemindfulness), leading to …
… an eight-minute Sounds and Thoughts meditation; we suggest that you practice this sequence twice a day. (See page 146 and track 5 online.)
A three-Minute Breathing Space meditation (track 8 online) that you do twice a day and also whenever you need it at any other time.
Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World Page 13