Mindfulness for Prolonged Grief

by Sameet M Kumar

  Start easy and gently. Be as patient with your body as meditation has taught you to be with your mind. Take your time to get into better physical shape. Just as with meditation, small steps can lead to big changes.

  Exercise and Mindfulness: Old Friends

  Although I feel like it’s neglected, the relationship between mindfulness and physical activity isn’t new. Historically, Buddhist monks who practiced mindfulness also begged for their food. This frequently entailed walking from where they slept, often far outside of villages or towns, with a begging bowl and walking stick. They would go from house to house until they had enough food—often unrefrigerated leftovers from the previous day—and then walk back to their sleeping quarters. These early monks had to walk for miles to obtain food, in addition to practicing meditation for hours. Physical activity was part of their practice. They didn’t need a gym, and their intensive meditation practice didn’t mean having a sedentary lifestyle—they walked everywhere, for hours each day.

  Cultures influenced by Buddhism or with preexisting traditions of regular meditation practice have long recognized the importance of physical exercise. In India, meditators have also practiced hatha yoga, which has become immensely popular around the world. Hatha yoga involves a series of mindful physical movements, often timed with the breath, that help relax the body and make practitioners aware of their movements.

  In China and Japan, martial arts based on circulating the vital energies of the body have been practiced by monks and laypeople who meditate regularly. Like yoga, martial arts such as tai chi, kung fu, and aikido stretch and invigorate the practitioner’s body. They are energetic complements to an otherwise sedentary meditation practice.

  practice: Moving Meditation

  During lengthy meditation sessions, such as full-day retreats, periods of sitting meditation are often interspersed with walking meditation. To practice walking meditation on your own, find a spacious place to practice. Walking meditation can be done indoors or outdoors, weather permitting. Make sure you have enough space to walk around in.

  Begin by doing sitting mindfulness meditation for at least ten minutes. When you’re ready to transition to walking meditation, stand up slowly while exhaling. Take a deep breath into your belly once you’re standing, then release it. Feel your feet grounded firmly and evenly on the floor or earth. Standing this way, take another belly breath and exhale slowly as you feel your body connecting with the ground through your feet.

  As you inhale, slowly raise your right heel. Shift your weight to your left foot. As you exhale, bring your right heel down on the ground in a step in front of you and slowly raise your left heel.

  As you inhale, raise your left foot completely off the ground as you begin to step. Pause midstep, with your left foot in the air in midstride, balancing on your right foot. Do this for however long you can. While exhaling, bring your left foot down heel first to complete the step.

  As your left heel touches the ground, lift your right heel, shifting your weight back to your left foot. Again, pause midstep, with your right foot in the air midstride, and balance on your left foot for as long as you can. While exhaling, bring your right food down heel first to complete the step.

  Repeat this for twenty-one breaths, stopping midstride in each step. This number of breaths has traditionally been used for meditation practices in the Tibetan tradition with which I am most familiar, and it seems to work well for most people. However, you can extend the practice for as long as you wish. Walking meditation is typically done in a circle with other practitioners. You can also walk mindfully in a circle by yourself. If you’re practicing with a group, try to time your steps and your breath together.

  Once you’ve developed this kind of mindfulness in motion with walking, you can apply it to any form of exercise you choose. I like to run, and I often count my exhalations as a way of transforming running into a meditation. You can count your breaths while on a treadmill, walking regularly, or swimming. I’ve also found mindfulness of my posture during exercise to be invaluable; it’s probably saved me from many injuries. Additionally, breathing mindfully through the belly can give you added endurance during many kinds of exercise.

  Making a Commitment

  In my opinion, you shouldn’t learn yoga or martial arts from a book. You should seek out a school that can put you in touch with an instructor who can offer you guidance and correct your posture as you engage in these practices.

  If you enroll in a class to learn these techniques, you’ll also reap the benefit of spending less time alone. Instead, you’ll be with a group of people who are all interested in the same thing. Another benefit of taking classes is that signing up creates a financial and social commitment. If you’re the type of person who needs to sign up and pay to do something to help motivate yourself, signing up for classes at a yoga studio or martial arts dojo can help you do that.

  Staying on Track

  One of the main complaints I’ve heard from people is that they feel like mindfulness and exercise aren’t helping them as much as they’d hoped or expected. On closer examination, this is almost always because they weren’t practicing for the recommended amounts of time.

  With these kinds of practices, it’s helpful to think of the amount of time you do them as a dosage. Imagine that you have a really bad headache. Would half an aspirin help? Would you take half an ibuprofen if you had a broken bone? If you did, you could say the medicine wasn’t helpful for you. However, the problem wasn’t the form of treatment; it was the dose. It’s the same with mindfulness and exercise.

  In this chapter, I’ve included charts for you to fill out to document your practice of both mindfulness meditation and exercise each week. You’ll find sixteen weekly tracking charts, because that’s the recommended minimum duration of an exercise program to promote well-being. You may wish to continue using these charts after the sixteen weeks have passed; you can find blank versions to download at www.newharbinger.com/27497.

  As previously mentioned, the dose for mindfulness is two twenty- to forty-minute sessions daily, ideally for at least eight weeks, and longer if you’d like. Most people take some time to work their way up to twenty to forty minutes of meditation. For many people, sixteen weeks is a sufficient period of time within which to build up their practice and then sustain eight weeks of consistent mindfulness practice at the recommended level. If you’re able to start with the recommended doses of mindfulness meditation right away, you might still wish to continue your practice for at least sixteen weeks. In my experience, most people find mindfulness meditation quite restorative and healing and continue to practice long after the prescribed time period ends.

  The dosage for exercise in terms of maintaining well-being is twenty to thirty minutes at least three times a week for sixteen weeks. You can certainly do more if you’d like, but not less. I’ve included two slots for exercise in the charts in case you choose to do different types of exercise. For example, if you’d like to use a treadmill a couple of days per week and go to a yoga class on other days, you can mark your treadmill workout as Exercise 1, and yoga as Exercise 2.

  You’ll also find a stress assessment like the one that appeared with the body scans before the chart for each week, along with a similar scale for energy level. At the start of each week, mark where you feel your stress level and energy level are in general, meaning how stressed and how energetic you feel most of the day. It’s fine to make a rough guess about each of these; don’t worry about getting it exactly right.

  Before the week 1 chart, after the week 8 chart, and again after the last chart, you’ll find a similar well-being scale. Make a mark along the line to indicate your overall sense of well-being. You can use all three scales to help you see whether you’re moving in the direction you’d like. If there isn’t as much change as you’d hoped, please keep trying. The rate of improvement can vary based on many factors, including individual differences between people.

  Initial Assessment

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e a mark on each line to indicate roughly where you are on this continuum.

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  Meditation and Exercise Tracking Chart

  Week 2 Assessment

  Make a mark on each line to indicate roughly where you are on this continuum.

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  Meditation and Exercise Tracking Chart

  Week 3 Assessment

  Make a mark on each line to indicate roughly where you are on this continuum.

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  Meditation and Exercise Tracking Chart

  Week 4 Assessment

  Make a mark on each line to indicate roughly where you are on this continuum.

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  Meditation and Exercise Tracking Chart

  Week 5 Assessment

  Make a mark on each line to indicate roughly where you are on this continuum.

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  Meditation and Exercise Tracking Chart

  Week 6 Assessment

  Make a mark on each line to indicate roughly where you are on this continuum.

  ___________ Maximum stress No stress

  ___________ No energy Maximum energy

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  Meditation and Exercise Tracking Chart

  Week 7 Assessment

  Make a mark on each line to indicate roughly where you are on this continuum.

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  Meditation and Exercise Tracking Chart

  Week 8 Assessment

  Make a mark on each line to indicate roughly where you are on this continuum.

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  Midpoint Well-Being Assessment

  Meditation and Exercise Tracking Chart

  Week 9 Assessment

  Make a mark on each line to indicate roughly where you are on this continuum.

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  Meditation and Exercise Tracking Chart

  Week 10 Assessment

  Make a mark on each line to indicate roughly where you are on this continuum.

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  Meditation and Exercise Tracking Chart

  Week 11 Assessment

  Make a mark on each line to indicate roughly where you are on this continuum.

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  Meditation and Exercise Tracking Chart

  Week 12 Assessment

  Make a mark on each line to indicate roughly where you are on this continuum.

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  Meditation and Exercise Tracking Chart

  Week 13 Assessment

  Make a mark on each line to indicate roughly where you are on this continuum.

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  Meditation and Exercise Tracking Chart

  Week 14 Assessment

  Make a mark on each line to indicate roughly where you are on this continuum.

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  Meditation and Exercise Tracking Chart

  Week 15 Assessment

  Make a mark on each line to indicate roughly where you are on this continuum.

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  Meditation and Exercise Tracking Chart

  Week 16 Assessment

  Make a mark on each line to indicate roughly where you are on this continuum.

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  Meditation and Exercise Tracking Chart

  Final Assessment

  Mindfulness and Your Body

  Research using brain scans has shown that mindfulness meditation can increase the amount of energy the brain devotes to being aware of the body while diminishing thoughts and feelings associated with depression (Farb et al. 2007). Mindfulness can help you feel more in touch with pleasant sensations in your body and thereby help your mind feel less distress.

  From what this research on mindfulness and the brain reveals, choices you make about how to
spend your time can have a profound impact on your mood by literally rewiring your brain. Mindfulness meditation and exercise both seem to increase the brain’s awareness of the body. People who study the brain call this body-centered awareness somatosensory awareness. In general, the more somatosensory awareness your brain has as a result of behavioral choices, the less likely it is to focus its energy on distressing mental chatter.

  When you begin meditating and exercising regularly, you get more in touch with many different aspects of physical health while also reducing the intensity of your stress response. As mentioned previously, becoming more aware of your body through meditation doesn’t mean focusing more on pain or feeling achy. Instead, what seems to happen in the brain as people’s meditation practice and exercise routines crystallize over several weeks is that they have an increased ability to experience emotional states as temporary physical sensations. This is quite different from feeling as though your emotional pain or physical symptoms will never go away.

  For example, before starting a daily meditation routine, you may have often felt extremely anxious. At such times, your breath became rapid and shallow, your mind raced, and you may have felt completely overwhelmed. When you have a regular meditation practice, you may still get anxious. However, you’re also likely to more easily notice that your breathing has changed and be able to intentionally shift it back to a more relaxed pattern, such as belly breathing. In addition, you’re likely to more easily notice that your body is tense in certain spots and be able to intentionally adjust your posture or relax those parts of your body. The anxiety still happens, but because you experience it differently, you can deal with it differently. The feeling doesn’t automatically take over your mind, engulf you, and ruin your day. Most importantly, your mental chatter doesn’t feed into a sense of overwhelmed helplessness.

  Summary

  Grief can feel like something too powerful and immense that’s happening to you. You can feel like you’re a helpless victim of its crushing emotions. Implementing changes such as regularly engaging in mindfulness meditation and exercise transforms your grief into a process in which you’re actively involved, rather than something that’s being inflicted on you. You’re becoming an active participant again in the choices you’re making, and beginning to transition from victim to survivor.