Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World Read online

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn

  1. Chasing Your Tail

  2. Why Do We Attack Ourselves?

  3. Waking Up to the Life You Have

  4. Introducing the Eight-Week Mindfulness Program

  5. Mindfulness Week One: Waking Up to the Autopilot

  6. Mindfulness Week Two: Keeping the Body in Mind

  7. Mindfulness Week Three: The Mouse in the Maze

  8. Mindfulness Week Four: Moving Beyond the Rumor Mill

  9. Mindfulness Week Five: Turning Toward Difficulties

  10. Mindfulness Week Six: Trapped in the Past or Living in the Present?

  11. Mindfulness Week Seven: When Did You Stop Dancing?

  12. Mindfulness Week Eight: Your Wild and Precious Life

  Notes

  Resources

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have come together if it were not for the help and support of many people. We are enormously grateful to Sheila Crowley at Curtis Brown and to Anne Lawrance and her team at Piatkus.

  Mark is grateful to the Wellcome Trust, not only for its generous financial support for the research that has sustained and extended the understanding of mindfulness, but also for the encouragement to take this work outside the academy.

  We are also grateful to the many other individuals who have helped this project: Guinevere Webster, Gerry Byrne and the participants at the Boundary Brook training course, Oxford; Catherine Crane, Danielle Duggan, Thorsten Barnhofer, Melanie Fennell, Wendy Swift and other members of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre (an institution that remains a testimony to its founder, Geoffrey Bamford); Melanie Fennell and Phyllis Williams, who made many careful suggestions on an earlier draft of the text; Ferris Buck Urbanowski, Antonia Sumbundu and John Peacock, on whose wisdom Mark continues to draw; John Teasdale and Zindel Segal, codevelopers of MBCT, and close friends for so many years; and Jon Kabat-Zinn, not only for his original inspiration for this work, and his generosity in sharing it with us, but also for his continuing encouragement to bring its strong and compassionate wisdom to a frantic world.

  Many of the ideas in this book and the words in which they are expressed come from the close collaboration over two decades between Mark Williams and Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Zindel Segal and John Teasdale. We are enormously grateful for their generosity in allowing us to once again share these ideas with people who are new to mindfulness, and with those who wish to renew their practice.

  Danny would also like to thank Pat Field of Neston County Comprehensive School for having the courage and foresight to teach meditation to a group of belligerent teenagers (including him). In the early 1980s this was a radical educational step and one that transformed many lives. He is especially grateful to Pippa Stallworthy for her help and guidance.

  Finally, each of us owes a tremendous debt to our families, and especially to our wives, Phyllis and Bella, for their loving support through our preoccupation with the inevitable challenges of writing.

  Foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn

  The world is all abuzz nowadays about mindfulness. This is a wonderful thing because we are sorely lacking, if not starving for some elusive but necessary element in our lives. We might even have a strong intuition on occasion that what is really missing in some profound way is us—our willingness or ability to show up fully in our lives and live them as if they really mattered, in the only moment we ever get, which is this one—and that we are worthy of inhabiting life in this way and capable of it. This is a very brave intuition or insight, and it matters enormously. It could be world-transforming. It is certainly profoundly nurturing and life-transforming for those who undertake it.

  That said, mindfulness is not merely a good idea: “Oh yes, I will just be more present in my life, and less judgmental, and everything will be better. Why didn’t that occur to me before?” Such ideas are at best fleeting and hardly ever gain sustained traction. While it might very well be a good idea to be more present and less judgmental, you won’t get very far with the idea alone. In fact, that thought might just make you feel more inadequate or out of control. To be effective, mindfulness requires an embodied engagement on the part of anyone hoping to derive some benefit from it. Another way to put it is that mindfulness, as Mark Williams and Danny Penman point out, is actually a practice. It is a way of being, rather than merely a good idea or a clever technique, or a passing fad. Indeed, it is thousands of years old and is often spoken of as “the heart of Buddhist meditation,” although its essence, being about attention and awareness, is universal.

  The practice of mindfulness has been shown to exert a powerful influence on one’s health, well-being and happiness, as attested to by the scientific and medical evidence presented in this book in a very accessible fashion. However, because it is a practice rather than merely a good idea, its cultivation is a process, one that of necessity unfolds and deepens over time. It is most beneficial if you take it on as a strong commitment to yourself, one that requires a degree of stick-to-it-ness and discipline, while at the same time being playful and bringing to each moment, as best you can, a certain ease and lightness of touch—a gesture of kindness and self-compassion, really. This lightness of touch, coupled with a steadfast and wholehearted engagement, is really a signature of mindfulness training and practice in all its various forms.

  It is very important to have good guidance along this path, for the stakes are actually quite high. Ultimately, the quality of your very life and your relationships to others and to the world you inhabit is at stake, to say nothing of the degree of well-being, mental balance, happiness and integration in your life as it unfolds. You would do well to put yourself in the experienced hands of Mark Williams and Danny Penman, and give yourself over to their guidance and to the program that they map out. The program provides a coherent structure, an architecture if you will, within which you can observe your own mind and body and life unfolding, and a systematic and trustworthy approach for working with whatever arises. This architecture is strongly evidence-based, arising out of the curricula of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), and fashioned into a coherent, compelling and commonsensical eight-week program for anyone caring about his or her own health and sanity, especially in this increasingly fast-paced and, as they refer to it, frantic world. I particularly like the simple yet radical habit-breaking suggestions, what they call “habit releasers,” that they offer, which are meant to reveal and break open some of our most unaware life patterns of thought and behavior, patterns that unbeknownst to us, tend to imprison us in a smallness that is definitely not the full story of who we are.

  And while you are putting yourself into the authors’ hands for guidance, you are also, most importantly, putting yourself very much into your own hands by making the commitment to yourself to actually follow their suggestions, to engage in the various formal and informal practices and habit releasers, and put them to the test by seeing what happens when you begin to pay attention and act with kindness and compassion toward yourself and others, even if it feels a bit artificial at first. Such a commitment is ultimately a radical act of trust and faith in yourself. In concert with the inspiring program offered here, it could really be the opportunity of a lifetime, and a chance to reclaim and befriend that “lifetime” and live it more fully, moment by moment by moment.

  I have known Mark Williams as a colleague, coauthor and good friend over many years. He is one of the premier researchers
in the field of mindfulness worldwide, and has been a pioneer in its development and dissemination. He is a cofounder, along with John Teasdale and Zindel Segal, of MBCT, which has been shown in many studies to make a huge difference in the lives of people with the condition known as major depressive disorder by dramatically lowering their risk of relapsing back into depression. He is also the founder of the Oxford Mindfulness Center, and before that, the Center for Mindfulness Research and Practice at Bangor University, North Wales. Both centers are at the forefront of research and clinical training in mindfulness-based interventions. Now, with journalist Danny Penman, Mark has put together this very practical and pragmatic guide to mindfulness and its cultivation. May you derive great benefit from engaging in this program and its invitation to explore how you might be in a wiser and more fulfilling relationship to your “one wild and precious life.”

  Jon Kabat-Zinn

  Boston, Massachusetts

  December 2010

  CHAPTER ONE

  Chasing Your Tail

  Can you remember the last time you lay in bed wrestling with your thoughts? You desperately wanted your mind to become calm, to just be quiet, so that you could get some sleep. But whatever you tried seemed to fail. Every time you forced yourself not to think, your thoughts exploded into life with renewed strength. You told yourself not to worry, but suddenly discovered countless new things to worry about. You tried fluffing up the pillow and rolling over to get more comfortable, but soon enough, you began thinking again. As the night ground ever onward, your strength progressively drained away, leaving you feeling fragile and broken. By the time the alarm went off, you were exhausted, bad-tempered and thoroughly miserable.

  Throughout the next day you had the opposite problem—you wanted to be wide awake, but could hardly stop yawning. You stumbled into work, but weren’t really present. You couldn’t concentrate. Your eyes were red and puffy. Your whole body ached and your mind felt empty. You’d stare at the pile of papers on your desk for ages, hoping something, anything, would turn up so that you could gather enough momentum to do a day’s work. In meetings, you could barely keep your eyes open, let alone contribute anything intelligent. It seemed as though your life had begun to slip through your fingers … you felt ever more anxious, stressed and exhausted.

  This is a book about how you can find peace and contentment in such troubled and frantic times as these. Or rather, this is a book about how you can rediscover them; for there are deep wellsprings of peace and contentment living inside us all, no matter how trapped and distraught we might feel. They’re just waiting to be liberated from the cage that our frantic and relentless way of life has crafted for them.

  We know this to be true because we—and our colleagues—have been studying anxiety, stress and depression for over thirty years at Oxford University, UMass, the University of Toronto, and other institutions around the world. This work has discovered the secret to sustained happiness and how you can successfully tackle anxiety, stress, exhaustion and even full-blown depression. It’s the kind of happiness and peace that gets into your bones and promotes a deep-seated authentic love of life, seeping into everything you do and helping you to cope more skillfully with the worst that life throws at you.

  It’s a secret that was well understood in the ancient world and is kept alive in some cultures even today. But many of us in the Western world have largely forgotten how to live a good and joyful existence. And it’s often even worse than this. We try so hard to be happy that we end up missing the most important parts of our lives and destroying the very peace that we were seeking.

  We wrote this book to help you understand where true happiness, peace and contentment can be found and how you can rediscover them for yourself. It will teach you how to free yourself progressively from anxiety, stress, unhappiness and exhaustion. We’re not promising eternal bliss; everyone experiences periods of pain and suffering, and it’s naive and dangerous to pretend otherwise. And yet, it is possible to taste an alternative to the relentless struggle that pervades much of our daily lives.

  In the following pages and in the accompanying downloads we offer a series of simple practices that you can incorporate into your daily life. They are based on mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) that grew out of the inspiring work of Jon Kabat-Zinn at the UMass Medical Center in America. The MBCT program was originally developed by Professor Mark Williams (coauthor of this book), John Teasdale at Cambridge and Zindel Segal of the University of Toronto. It was designed to help people who had suffered repeated bouts of serious depression to overcome their illness. Clinical trials show that it works. It’s been clinically proven to halve the risk of depression in those who have suffered the most debilitating forms of the illness. It’s at least as effective as antidepressants, and has none of their downsides. In fact, it is so effective that it’s now one of the preferred treatments recommended by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.

  The MBCT technique revolves around a form of meditation that was little known in the West until recently. Mindfulness meditation is so beautifully simple that it can be used by the rest of us to reveal our innate joie de vivre. Not only is this worthwhile in itself, but it can also prevent normal feelings of anxiety, stress and sadness from spiraling downwards into prolonged periods of unhappiness and exhaustion—or even serious clinical depression.

  A one-minute meditation

  * * *

  Sit erect in a straight-backed chair. If possible, bring your back a little way from the rear of the chair so that your spine is self-supporting. Your feet can be flat on the floor. Close your eyes or lower your gaze.

  Focus your attention on your breath as it flows in and out of your body. Stay in touch with the different sensations of each in-breath and each out-breath. Observe the breath without looking for anything special to happen. There is no need to alter your breathing in any way.

  After a while your mind may wander. When you notice this, gently bring your attention back to your breath, without giving yourself a hard time—the act of realizing that your mind has wandered and bringing your attention back without criticizing yourself is central to the practice of mindfulness meditation.

  Your mind may eventually become calm like a still pond—or it may not. Even if you get a sense of absolute stillness, it may only be fleeting. If you feel angry or exasperated, notice that this may be fleeting too. Whatever happens, just allow it to be as it is.

  After a minute, let your eyes open and take in the room again.

  * * *

  A typical meditation consists of focusing your full attention on your breath as it flows in and out of your body (see “A one-minute meditation” on the opposite page). Focusing on each breath in this way allows you to observe your thoughts as they arise in your mind and, little by little, to let go of struggling with them. You come to realize that thoughts come and go of their own accord; that you are not your thoughts. You can watch as they appear in your mind, seemingly from thin air, and watch again as they disappear, like a soap bubble bursting. You come to the profound understanding that thoughts and feelings (including negative ones) are transient. They come and they go, and ultimately, you have a choice about whether to act on them or not.

  Mindfulness is about observation without criticism; being compassionate with yourself. When unhappiness or stress hovers overhead, rather than taking it all personally, you learn to treat them as if they were black clouds in the sky, and to observe them with friendly curiosity as they drift past. In essence, mindfulness allows you to catch negative thought patterns before they tip you into a downward spiral. It begins the process of putting you back in control of your life.

  Over time, mindfulness brings about long-term changes in mood and levels of happiness and well-being. Scientific studies have shown that mindfulness not only prevents depression, but that it also positively affects the brain patterns underlying day-to-day anxiety, stress, depression and irritability so that when they arise, they dissolve
away again more easily. Other studies have shown that regular meditators see their doctors less often and spend fewer days in hospital. Memory improves, creativity increases and reaction times become faster (see “The benefits of mindfulness meditation” on the following page).

  The benefits of mindfulness meditation

  * * *

  Numerous psychological studies have shown that regular meditators are happier and more contented than average.1 these are not just important results in themselves but have huge medical significance, as such positive emotions are linked to a longer and healthier life.2

  Anxiety, depression and irritability all decrease with regular sessions of meditation.3 Memory also improves, reaction times become faster and mental and physical stamina increase.4

  Regular meditators enjoy better and more fulfilling relationships.5