The second session should be sometime in the second half of the day. If you do the second session later at night, I recommend not doing it right before bedtime. Chapter 4 includes some instruction in mindfulness-based sleeping techniques, but I don’t think these count as a formal meditation session. Doing second sessions just before bedtime is not something that has been tested.
Years ago, I went to a teaching by renowned Tibetan Buddhist teacher Sogyal Rinpoche. He had just written his landmark book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. When asked a question about scheduling meditation practice, he answered succinctly, “Practice in the morning, and not too late in the day. You need to have waking moments to integrate the practice into.”
Tracking Your Practice
For the first few weeks of practice, it may be helpful for you to log your progress in the following charts. Notice if your practice is becoming more organized and structured day by day. The goal is to have a fairly steady and regular practice within a month or so. Because you may wish to continue using these charts in the long term, we’ve made additional copies available at www.newharbinger.com/27497.
Once you have a stable meditation practice, you may find that you can better organize your day. When I first began my practice, I found that mindfulness meditation seemed to make my use of time more efficient; when I spent twenty minutes meditating, the next several hours flowed more smoothly and easily. I felt sharper and more alert. Still, for several months, whenever I sat down to meditate my mind would tell me that I was merely wasting precious time “doing nothing.” However, something was happening: My mind was becoming less inclined to stress, anxiety, and rumination, even while resisting the routine of daily meditation practice.
Although you may feel as though your time is already too tight and you can’t accomplish everything you need to do, I think it’s helpful to put things in context. For two days, track how much time you spend watching TV, surfing the Internet, and engaging in other time-wasting activities, such as ruminating, repeatedly checking social media, or just sitting around and doing nothing. Here’s a chart to help you track this time.
My intention in helping you focus on how you spend your time isn’t to shame you or belittle what you do day to day. Instead, I find it interesting to track empirically how much time we actually spend checking social media, watching television mindlessly, and so on while we continue to resist meditation practice, which can be so helpful. Like many other people, you may appreciate how helpful meditation can be to you in your grief, yet still resist the urge to begin and maintain a regular practice.
You are not alone. Remember, your mind, like countless other minds, craves permanence and cannot tolerate the empty spaces in your daily life, much less in your future. Any sort of meditation or self-care activity at such a raw emotional time as you are going through may be perceived as a threat or danger to the stability of your suffering.
It might sound strange to you: “a threat or danger to the stability of your suffering.” However, making changes within a painful situation is often the difficult first step toward healing. Be gentle with yourself.
Difficult Emotions During Mindfulness Practice
If you find that you’re experiencing a lot of emotional distress during your mindfulness practice, try to keep doing the belly breathing for a short time. Try to work with the stress of your suffering using breath control alone. If you can get through a few minutes of meditating without crying or feeling intense anxiety, try it for another few minutes a short time later. It may take a while, but eventually you’ll be able to stay with mindfulness meditation practice for a longer period of time.
If you can’t get through more than a few minutes of practice without feeling like your pain is getting worse, try to focus more on your breath rising and falling from your belly. Does it seem harder to do this when you’re feeling emotional pain? Bring your awareness back to your breath as many times as you need to. If the intensity of the emotions continues to be insurmountable, work with the body scan techniques in the next chapter instead. If this is the case, you can use the charts in this chapter to track a regular practice of the body scan instead of sitting practice. However, do this only if you genuinely can’t sit through a regular mindfulness meditation session.
Summary
Remember, when your body and mind experience stress, they start to function almost automatically. This is part of what makes mindfulness meditation so helpful. A regular mindfulness practice can help diminish the cascade of automatic stress reactions that accompanies prolonged grief, depression, PTSD, anxiety, and panic.
I would be lying if I said that everyone I teach mindfulness to begins a daily twenty-minute practice right away. It usually takes some time. First, try to work with the belly breathing by itself for a few days. Then try to sit for formal mindfulness meditation sessions. You may be able to do it for only five minutes at a time. That’s okay. You have to start somewhere.
After a few weeks, the mindfulness meditation practice will begin to feel like a natural, integral part of your day. I believe that this will happen, and that it will help you feel less stressed in your suffering and more open to some of the positive aspects of the change and impermanence that are inevitable in life.
Chapter 3
Mindfulness of the Body
The sitting practice of mindfulness is an essential foundation for developing mindfulness skills and cultivating a more wholesome, healthy response to challenges in life. I recommend that everyone who begins practicing mindfulness meditation start with a regular sitting practice, preferably in the earlier part of the day. Once your body is accustomed to regular periods of belly breathing, you may begin to experience some of the benefits of ongoing mindfulness practice in many areas of your life.
In this chapter, we’ll turn to mindfulness techniques that focus specifically on relaxing the body. When the first instructions for mindfulness were written down, sitting practice wasn’t the only technique that was presented. The Buddha described mindfulness practice as being applicable to walking, standing, and lying down. The common thread for all of these was awareness of where the breath was going and the length of each inhalation and exhalation, and extension of awareness to thoughts, feelings, and sensations and letting them go without judgment or clinging.
The Buddha’s instructions were designed for people new to the practice of meditation. Please note that the Buddha did not expect practitioners, or even himself, to empty or clear their minds, but simply to observe the kaleidoscope of mental and physical activity. The idea that a clear mind is required for meditation is absolutely incorrect. Eventually, with a lot of practice, most meditators have moments of clarity. However, they don’t ever start with them. Please don’t be discouraged by being normal—by having a wandering, chattering mind that often feels chaotic and uncentered.
The Mindful Brain
What we know from modern scientific studies of the brain is that it seems to make choices about how to spend energy. Your brain can’t easily ruminate and be mindful at that same time, although it will certainly try. What winds up happening at some point during the first eight weeks of a new daily mindfulness meditation practice is that, instead of spending a lot of energy chattering away about anything it can, the brain instead becomes more contemplative about the body. A mindful brain is more centered within the body, and as the attention paid to verbal chatter diminishes, this feels more relaxing and calming (Farb et al. 2007).
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging technology, which can take pictures of the brain as it’s working, we know that a couple of months of regular mindfulness meditation changes brain activity from focusing on mental chatter to awareness of the body, resulting in decreased stress activation (Farb et al. 2007). Mindful brains seem to focus more on awareness of the body. If you have a lot of aches and pains or physical discomfort, you may be relieved to know that this heightened physical awareness usually doesn’t mean more physical discomfort. Instead, because the stress circui
try isn’t as activated, people tend to experience a double benefit of less tension in the body and greater awareness of a less tense body.
Grief Is Stressful
When most people think of grief, they think of sadness or emotional distress. Many of us don’t understand how stressful grief can feel. It’s fairly common for people who are in prolonged stressful states such as grief or anxiety to have physical discomfort or pain. Stress is inflammatory, meaning that when left untreated, it can cause a buildup of the same substances that cause aches and pains when you have a cold or flu. These substances, called cytokines, are natural defenses that the human body has developed over the ages to help maintain health.
The body still seems to experience almost any form of stress—mental, emotional, spiritual, and so on—as physical stress. It goes into survival mode, assuming that a physical threat is imminent. Your body assumes that it’s going to be wounded by an animal or sharp object and prepares to fight off any potential infection. As part of the stress response, your body releases cytokines to temporarily supercharge the immune system. This stress response can save your life if you are indeed wounded or infected. However, with prolonged grief this inflammatory response can make you feel unwell. The stress response system can’t be activated at high levels for a long time without becoming impaired or causing problems for your mind and body. The cytokines themselves can make you feel tired, achy, and lethargic, as if you had a cold but without the congestion.
The techniques described in this chapter have helped many of my patients and often have a more immediate effect on reducing stress than sitting practice. However, they should be used together with sitting practice. Most of the research on mindfulness practice has been performed on people who do sitting meditation. You may find the body scans tremendously enjoyable and relaxing, and they are very helpful. But we don’t yet know whether they are as powerful as regular sitting practice in changing how the brain works.
Body Scan Techniques
The Buddha didn’t have access to functional magnetic resonance imaging technology, but he did realize that mindfulness practice results in greater awareness of the body. He also understood that how our minds behave depends largely on the choices we make in how to direct our mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical resources. Therefore, he taught body scan techniques to help jump-start the process of using our resources intentionally and make it more efficient.
When the Buddha taught body scans, he had some simple advice. He instructed practitioners to review the body beginning at the feet and going up to the scalp and then back down again. These early body scan techniques tended to dwell in minute detail on the “repulsive” parts of the body to help monks and nuns maintain their vows of celibacy.
Over the years, other body scan techniques have been devised. Fortunately for those of us who are neither monks nor nuns, nor under vows of celibacy, these techniques can be quite helpful even without meditating on the “repulsiveness” of the body. As mentioned, a mindful brain seems to become more focused on sensations within the body at the expense of activating stress circuits. One benefit of body scan techniques may be emphasizing and reinforcing this tendency to shift focus to the body.
You should practice body scan techniques in the morning or early afternoon at the latest. If you do them later in the day, they may cause you to fall asleep. The next chapter will provide you with practices that can help you sleep better. But for the purpose of easing your mind and reducing your overall stress level, it’s best if you have several hours of waking experience after the body scan to integrate the practice, as with sitting mindfulness practice.
Even if you practice earlier in the day, you may fall asleep doing a body scan. If you do, this tends to be a very restful, intense, and deep sleep. Enjoy it if it happens, but also pay attention to the sleep hygiene guidelines in the next chapter.
As with sitting meditation, regular practice is essential with body scans. My advice is to try each of the techniques in this chapter a few times. After doing so, you may wish to practice just one of them, or you may wish to alternate or combine them. When working with these techniques based on the descriptions in the book, you may find that you’re rushing through them or that they are of very short duration. Over time, as you practice them repeatedly, you’ll find that it takes longer to complete them. Ideally, each should take ten to fifteen minutes. Don’t worry if you take longer. However, if you find that you’re doing them in just a few minutes, you may wish to go slower or repeat the practice.
Just as with sitting meditation, body scans need not be done perfectly to be effective. However, as you practice these relaxation techniques regularly, you’ll get better and better at them.
Before you start, let me explain the simple stress test that appears at the beginning and end of each of the techniques described in this chapter. It looks like this:
Before you start each practice, make a mark along the line (or draw your own scale on a separate sheet of paper) to show where you feel your stress level is. When you complete the practice, you’ll find the same test again. Compare your responses to the techniques. You may find that you benefit more from one technique than another. If this happens consistently, you may choose to focus on the more beneficial technique. That’s okay. Use what works for you.
You may also decide that each technique serves a different purpose for you. For instance, you may find that progressive muscle relaxation, which involves tensing muscles and then releasing the tension, reduces your stress level dramatically. However, you may find yourself feeling very stressed in a situation where you can’t practice it, such as in a public place where it might be awkward to be tensing and relaxing the muscles in your face or other parts of your body. In that case, you may be able to do passive muscle relaxation or a sitting mindfulness practice much more discreetly. By being familiar with many different techniques, you can expand the tools you have available to choose from depending on the situation. The bottom line is to use what works for you when you can.
Remember, though, that even though the body scans are effective relaxation techniques, they haven’t been researched to the same degree as sitting mindfulness meditation practice, so we don’t yet know whether they are as powerful as sitting meditation or can replace it. We don’t know if, by themselves, they can change how the brain works in the same way sitting mindfulness practice can. Future research may very well indicate that this is the case, but for now there isn’t enough research to support that claim.
One last note: I strongly recommend that you use the bathroom just before practicing any of the body scan techniques. Relaxation training requires attention to all parts of your body, and you don’t want to have to stop in the middle to relieve yourself.
practice: Progressive Muscle Relaxation
One of the first relaxation techniques designed for broad use is called progressive muscle relaxation (PMR). It was invented by physician Edmund Jacobson (1938) in the early twentieth century and has been used with tremendous success by thousands of people suffering from many different physical and psychological ailments. It seems to be particularly useful for people prone to anxiety, panic attacks, and phobias.
PMR is a very simple and effective technique. As you get better at it, you can use the parts of it that you know are particularly helpful for you. The basics of PMR are that when you’re stressed, depressed, or anxious, your body tends to be tense. Practicing how to tense and then relax your body part by part can help make relaxation more accessible and attainable in daily life. Your body doesn’t need to practice to learn how to be tense, but relaxation may require some training.
Before you begin, ask yourself how tense and stressed you feel. On the line below (or on a scale drawn on a separate piece of paper), mark your current stress level.
Find a quiet, comfortable spot to practice. For PMR, you can be sitting or lying down. Standing isn’t recommended, especially at first. Do the practice with your eyes closed. You may wish to read over the entire
technique first so you don’t have to refer to the book repeatedly as you practice. All the counting can be done silently in your mind, as in sitting mindfulness meditation.
Begin with your feet. Tense them as tightly as you can. Slowly count to ten as you keep them tense. Then relax, slowly counting to twenty. Notice how relaxed your feet feel.
Tense your calves. Slowly count to ten as you keep them tense. Then relax while slowly counting to twenty.
Tense your thighs. Slowly count to ten as you keep them tense. Then relax while slowly counting to twenty.
Tense your belly. This may mean hardening your abdominal muscles. Slowly count to ten as you keep your belly tensed. Relax while slowly counting to twenty.
Tense your buttocks. Slowly count to ten as you keep them tense. Relax while slowly counting to twenty.
Tense your chest or breast muscles. Slowly count to ten as you keep the muscles tense. Relax while slowly counting to twenty.
Tense your fists as hard as you can. Slowly count to ten as you keep your fists tense. Release and relax while slowly counting to twenty.
Tense your forearms. Slowly count to ten as you keep them tense. Relax while slowly counting to twenty.
Tense your upper arms, or biceps. Slowly count to ten as you keep them tense. Relax while slowly counting to twenty.
Tense your shoulders. Slowly count to ten as you keep them tense. Relax while slowly counting to twenty.
Mindfulness for Prolonged Grief Page 5