And the foundation for much of this guilt and shame is fear—the inner bully that we all carry around in our heads: fear that we’re not good enough; fear that if we relax we’ll begin to fail; fear that if we let ourselves off the leash, all hell will break loose; fear that if we don’t maintain our defenses we’ll be overwhelmed … And if we fear that others will criticize us, why not play safe and attack ourselves with a few homemade criticisms first?4 One fear leads to another, which feeds into another, in an endless debilitating cycle that saps our energy, leaving us like a hollow shell drifting through life.
But there’s also something else in Kate’s experience that may easily go unnoticed: the theme of irreversibility in all her thoughts. After the accident she felt different in some unchangeable way. And struggling in the midst of her trauma and depression, with the antidepressants not really helping, she’d felt that her life was irreversibly damaged; that she’d lost something that she’d never find again. Any of us can fall into the same mental trap. We can carry with us a hidden assumption that, because of what has happened to us, nothing at all can ever be the same again.
But why does this happen? The answer lies in the way we remember events from the past. Scientific research has made great progress in understanding how memory for events in our life works and how it can go wrong. In experiments conducted over many years by Mark Williams and colleagues, volunteers recall an event in the past when they felt happy. It does not necessarily have to have been an important one, but one that lasted less than a day from any time in the past. Most of us find it easy to recall something. Perhaps we’d remember some good news or walking in the hills and seeing a dramatic view, a first kiss or a day out with a good friend. Notice that the memory has worked smoothly, retrieving a specific event—something that happened on a particular day and time and place (even if you cannot recall exactly when it took place). You could try more examples for yourself using the questions in the box on page 190.
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Memories of real events
Look at the words below. Think of a real event that has happened to you, and that comes into your mind when you see each of these words. Keep in mind or write down what happened. (It doesn’t matter whether the real event happened a long time ago or only recently, but it should be something that lasted for less than one day.)
For example, if “fun” was one of the words, it would be OK to say, “I had fun when I went to Jane’s party,” but it would not be OK to say, “I always have fun at parties,” because that doesn’t mention a particular event. Do your best to write something for each word.
In each case, remember to come up with something that lasted for less than one day.
Think of a time when you felt:
Happy
Bored
Relieved
Hopeless
Excited
Failure
Lonely
Sad
Lucky
Relaxed
* * *
But it is not always easy to be specific. Research has found that if we’ve experienced traumatic events in the past, or if we are depressed or exhausted or locked into a brooding preoccupation about our feelings, then our memory shows a different pattern. Instead of doing the work of retrieving one specific event, the retrieval process stops short when it has only completed the first step of recollection: retrieving a summary of events. Very often, the result is what psychologists call an “overgeneral memory.”
So when Kate was asked if could she think of something—any particular event in the past—that made her feel happy, she said, “Me and my roommate used to go out on the weekends.” Her memory had stopped short of producing a particular episode. And when asked to recall any specific event that had made her feel sorry, she said, “Arguments with my mom.” When asked if she remembered any particular time, she simply said, “We always argued.”
Kate’s response is not unique. Research conducted by our team at Oxford, and in other labs throughout the world, has discovered that this pattern is very common for some people, particularly those who are too tired or frantic to think straight, those who are prone to depression or those with traumatic life histories. At first, the impact that this memory difficulty might have was unclear. Then it was found that the more people tended to retrieve memories in this nonspecific way, the more difficulty they had in letting go of the past and the more affected they were by things going wrong in their lives right now and rebuilding their lives again after an upset.5 For example, in 2007 Professor Richard Bryant, working in Sydney, Australia, found that firefighters who showed this pattern of memory when they joined the fire service were later found to have been more traumatized by what they had to witness as part of their stressful jobs.6 Another colleague, Professor Anke Ehlers, found that those with this overgeneral memory pattern were more likely to suffer PTSD after an assault. When they investigated further, they found that this memory difficulty went along with a tendency to brood, and also, importantly, with the feeling that the assault had in some way changed things permanently and irreversibly.7
The dance of ideas
* * *
Imagine you’re in a crowded bar and see a friend talking to one of your work colleagues. You smile and wave at them. They are looking in your direction, but don’t seem to notice you.
What thoughts go through your mind? How do you feel?
You might think that such a scene is clear-cut, but it’s actually highly ambiguous. Show it to half a dozen people and you will get a range of answers that depend more on the state of mind of the person being asked than on any concrete “reality.” If something has recently happened to make you happy, you will probably assume that your friends didn’t see you waving at them. The scene will soon be forgotten. But if you are unhappy or distressed for some reason (any reason), the dance of ideas will be choreographed differently and the scene will take on an entirely different meaning: you may conclude that your friends are trying to avoid you or that maybe you had lost more friends. You might think:
They are avoiding me. Here we go again. Maybe she never liked me and spent ages trying to lose me. Why is friendship so transient? The world is becoming increasingly shallow.
Such “self-talk” can quickly turn a period of fragile sadness into a longer and deeper bout of unhappiness that leaves you questioning many of your most cherished beliefs. Why?
Our minds are always desperately trying to make sense of the world—and they do this in the context of baggage accumulated over many years together with the mood of the moment. They are constantly gathering up scraps of information and trying to fit them together into a meaningful picture. They do this by constantly referring back to the past and seeing if the present is beginning to pan out in the same way. They then extrapolate these models into the future and see, once again, if a new pattern or theme emerges. Juggling such patterns is one of the defining characteristics of being human. It’s how we impose meaning on the world.
When the dance freezes
This dance of ideas is amazing to behold, until it starts to “freeze.” Overgeneral memory tends to freeze the past as a by-product of its tendency to summarize—the summary is then taken as true forever. So once you have interpreted your friends’ behavior in the bar as “rejection,” you rarely go back to the actual details of the situation and consider other interpretations. You overgeneralize, especially if you are tired or preoccupied with your own problems. And when the dance of ideas freezes, all you remember later is yet another example of people rejecting you. Your world loses its texture and color and becomes black or white—win or lose.
* * *
What we now understand from this research is something hugely important: that the feeling that “things are irreversible” or that “I have been damaged forever” is a very toxic aspect of a pattern of mind. But it is a pattern of mind in which we can easily get stuck, because the very thought itself seems to say: I am permanent: there is nothing you can do about me: I am with you fo
rever. This sense of permanence arises from a tendency to be trapped in the past, recalling events in an overgeneral way. And this overgenerality is fed by a tendency to suppress memories of events we don’t like or by simply brooding about them. Suppression and brooding are exhausting, and this also feeds overgeneralized recall. And once our memories are overgeneral, we don’t return to the specifics of what has actually happened in the past; instead, we get caught and trapped inside our sense of guilt for what has happened and hopelessness about anything ever changing in the future. It feels permanent, but the good news is that it is temporary. Despite the propaganda it represents, it can change. Our research has found that eight weeks of mindfulness training makes memory more specific and less overgeneral.8 Mindfulness releases us from the trap of over-generality.
If you have been following along with the meditations up to this point, you may have experienced this for yourself. Acceptance of the “guilts” and “fears” from the past—seeing them as mere straws in the wind—may have begun to allow you some respite. You may be finding oases of peace in your life. Perhaps you have found yourself recalling with a greater sense of ease events from the past—events that you had previously found difficult to bring to mind without huge emotional turbulence. You may still feel the pain of them, perhaps even acutely, but begin to sense that these events actually belong to the past, and could be let go of, placed back in the past where they rightly belong.
Treating yourself with kindness
* * *
How harsh and judgmental are you toward yourself? Treating yourself with kindness and ceasing to judge yourself harshly are cornerstones of finding peace in a frantic world. Ask yourself the following questions:9
Do I criticize myself for having irrational or inappropriate emotions?
Do I tell myself I shouldn’t be feeling the way I’m feeling?
Do I believe some of my thoughts are abnormal or bad and I shouldn’t think that way?
Do I make judgments about whether my thoughts are good or bad?
Do I tell myself that I shouldn’t be thinking the way I do?
Do I think some of my emotions are bad or inappropriate and I shouldn’t feel them?
When I have distressing thoughts or images, do I judge myself as good or bad, depending what the thought/image is about?
Do I disapprove of myself when I have irrational ideas?
If you endorsed strongly more than one or two of these questions, you may be being too hard on yourself. Could you begin treating yourself with more compassion? The trick with this questionnaire is to understand that you’re being too harsh on yourself without seeing this fact as a criticism. See your responses as an aid to awareness, rather than as a sign of success or failure.
* * *
This is because, day by day, you have been exploring an alternative to the automatic brooding “avoidant” mode of mind that induces overgenerality, getting you stuck in the past, putting a fog over the future. The Raisin meditation, the Breath and Body meditation, the Body Scan, the Mindful Movement, the learning to relate to thoughts as you relate to sounds, the exploration of the difficult by working through the body—each of these has contributed to learning that there is, for you, a new possibility. There is a possibility of dwelling, moment by moment, in a state of mind that cradles you in a nonjudgmental and compassionate wisdom.
In teaching mindfulness classes, we see many examples of people discovering the freedom that comes when they realize that something they thought was permanent was, in fact, changeable. But sometimes, all of the meditations you’ve practiced up to now can leave a corner of the mind untouched. Somehow, many people seem to be able to meditate for weeks, months or years, and never really hear the message of kindness for themselves. They think of meditation as another thing to do.
So, you need to go one step further if you want not only to bring about the bone-deep peace that comes from cultivating mindfulness, but also to help sustain it in the light of the stresses that life throws at you. You need to relate to the world with kindness and compassion, and you can only do this if you come home to who you are, accepting yourself with deepest respect, honor and, yes, love. The last meditation we are going to invite you to share is a befriending meditation. In this meditation you acknowledge that however hard you find it to be compassionate to others, it can feel even harder to bring kindness to yourself.
Practices for Week Six
* * *
There is one new meditation this week. It is the ten-minute Befriending meditation detailed on page 198 (track 7 online at http://bit.ly/rodalemindfulness)—to be done on six days out of the next seven. Each time you come to do it, prepare yourself by sitting quietly, using track 1 or 4 online to guide you (Weeks One and Three), or, if you feel able, without the help of any tracks at all. In addition:
Continue with the Three-Minute Breathing Space meditation (see p. 132), aiming to do this twice a day and whenever you feel you need it.
You should also try to carry out one of the Habit Releasers detailed at the end of this chapter.
* * *
Week Six helps you bring kindness back into your life—kindness not just for others but for yourself too.
* * *
The Befriending meditation10
Take a few minutes now to become settled in a warm and comfortable place where you can be by yourself for a while, relaxed and alert.
Find a posture that, for you, embodies a sense of dignity and wakefulness. If you are sitting, allow the spine to be strong, the shoulders relaxed, the chest open and the head balanced.
Focus on the breath, and then expand attention to the whole body for a few minutes, until you feel settled.
When the mind wanders, acknowledge where it went, remembering that you have a choice now: either to escort it back to whatever you had intended to focus on or, instead, to allow your attention to drop into the body to explore where you are experiencing the trouble or concern. Feel free to use any previous meditations as part of your preparation for this one.
When you are ready, allow some—or all—of these phrases to come to mind, changing the words if you choose, so that they connect to you and become, for you, your own gateway into a deep sense of friendliness toward yourself:
May I be free from suffering.
May I be as happy and healthy as it is possible for me to be.
May I have ease of being.
Taking your time, imagine that each phrase is a pebble dropped down into a deep well. You are dropping each one in turn, then listening to any reaction in thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations or impulse to act. There is no need to judge what arises. This is for you.
If you find it difficult to bring forth any sense of friendship toward yourself, bring to mind a person (or even a pet) who, either in the past or present, has loved you unconditionally. Once you have a clear sense of their love for you, see if you can return to offering this love to yourself: May I be free from suffering. May I be happy and healthy. May I have ease of being.
Remain with this step for as long as you wish before moving to the next.
At a certain point, bring to mind a loved one, and wish them well in the same way (using he, she, or they, as you prefer): May he (she/they) be free from suffering. May he (she/they) be as happy and healthy as it is possible for them to be. May he (she/they) have ease of being.
Once again, see what arises in mind and body as you hold the person in mind and heart, wishing them well. Once again, allow responses to come. Take your time. Pause between phrases—listening attentively. Breathing.
When you are ready to move on, choose a stranger. This may be someone you see regularly, perhaps in the street or on the bus or train—someone you recognize, but may not know the name of; someone you feel neutral about. Recognize that, although you do not know them, they probably also have a life full of hopes and fears as you have. They too wish to be happy, as you do. So, keeping them in heart and mind, repeat the phrases and wish them well.
Now, i
f you choose to extend this meditation further, you might wish to bring to mind someone whom you find difficult (past or present). This does not have to be the most difficult person in your life, but whomever you choose, now intentionally allow them to be in your heart and mind, acknowledging that they, too, may wish (or have wished) to be happy, and to be free from suffering. Repeat the phrases: May he (she) be free from suffering. May he (she) be happy and healthy. May he (she) have ease of being. Pausing. Listening. Noticing sensations in the body. Seeing if it is possible to explore these feelings without censoring them or judging yourself.
Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World Page 18