Light Mind
How Mindfulness can Enhance your Daily Life
Description
ABOUT THE BOOK
Mindfulness involves deliberate awareness of the flow of our present moment experiences. In this book, counsellor and writer Padraig O'Morain provides exercises that will help you practise mindfulness immediately and explains how mindfulness can deepen many areas of your life, including your relationships.
If you have never practised mindfulness, this book will show you how to start. If you already practise mindfulness, this book will deepen and broaden your approach.
Light Mind includes a guide for the use of mindfulness in counselling, drawing on O'Morain's mindfulness workshops for counsellors. It also includes a chapter on mindfulness in sports, an area in which the value of mindfulness has been recognised for some decades, especially in tennis and golf.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor and columnist with The Irish Times, The Irish Medical News and The Evening Herald. He is the author of Like a Man: A Guide to men’s Emotional Well-Being and that`s Men - a collection of the Irish Times columns of the same name. This is his fourth book.
Editorial Review
Mindfulness is an idea that seems in vogue at the moment in both religious and secular circles. To some it may seem a vague concept and we are not sure that O'Morain helps when he defines it as involving "deliberate awareness of the flow of our present moment experiences". O'Morain himself is a counsellor and he also writes for various Irish newspapers. He has written one book already, Like a Man : a guide to men's emotional well-being while his Irish Times column has been published as a collection under the title That's Men. This book is directed at a wider readership and is a guide to mindfulness for both the beginner and the established practitioner. He considers mindfulness in the context of everyday life, in workshops and in sport, particularly tennis and golf. Reading the book one discovers that mindfulness derives from the Buddhist tradition. O'Morain seeks to tutor the reader through a series of exercises, mental and physical, and to show how this can help us in times of stress, in our relationships, coping with the hustle and bustle of everyday life and the rest of life's challenges.
- Books Ireland, February 2010
A timely book, this. People are stressed in recession and need to learn to live deliberately in the now. ''Mindfulness', the author summarises, is ''an intentional and accepting awareness of what I experience right now''.
No jumping ahead and asking oneself ''supposing this or that happened, and then, and then?'' Yes, we have to be calmly sensible in planning ahead, but not ''catastrophising''. Many of the fears into which we put so much energy, never happen. Pay attention to the experience of the present moment. ''Buddhism made [such] mindfulness central to its practice and early Hindu texts allude to it.''
As the author points out, being mindful is not easy. ''You have to pay attention to whatever is going on for you right now.'' We need help in learning to wait and give things time. Even in our age of stress, this is possible, actually saves time in the end and is enriching. Padraig O'Morain helps us to ''accept that you drift away and then bring yourself back kindly to awareness.'' The word ''kindly'' typifies the gentleness that should characterise the art of ''mindfulness''.
O'Morain gives a simple example of mindfulness in our attitude to the weather. ''Have I labelled wind and rain as 'bad'? If so, I may face a wet day by being hunched and having a grim expression.'' Mindfulness enables us to learn the alternative attitude. The goodness of practising mindfulness takes time to become an habitual way of life for us. It helps us to be aware of the ''ordinary and good'' to which we may have become blinded because of familiarity or routine.
The author also engages us with the use of mindfulness in sport where people tend to be unduly self critical, worried about failure and fantasising about the result of either winning or losing. Indeed such concerns can affect our socialising about which many of us worry unnecessarily. Sections about mindfulness in anxiety and depression are most interesting. This book could enable life-enhancing experiences in many areas of relationships
- Peter Costello, The Irish Catholic, 4th February 2010
First Chapter
INTRODUCTIONS AND EXPLANATIONS
Mindfulness? What’s that?
Mindfulness is awareness of the present moment, but that’s not all.
Mindfulness is living in the here and now, but that’s not all.
Mindfulness is knowing what you’re doing when you’re doing it, but that’s not all.
Mindfulness is all these things, yes, but it is also acceptance, curiosity, a non-judgemental attitude towards your experience and, perhaps the really difficult part, an attitude of kindness towards yourself.
Here is a description of the mechanics of mindfulness: Take your attention away from the past and future and away from your imagination. Become aware of what is going on right now. Notice with your senses: what you are seeing and hearing; that you are breathing; standing; walking or sitting or lying down; the feel of the air against your skin as you move along. Your mind will keep drifting out of the present so you need to keep bringing it back. It is bringing your mind back to the present that makes up the basic practice of mindfulness.
Note that I said the ‘basic’ practice of mindfulness. You could become aware of what is going on for you in the here and now and you could judge yourself very harshly for feeling whatever it is you notice you are feeling. But mindfulness involves an acceptance of experience. Mindfulness doesn’t say, ‘Well, I feel anxious now and that’s bad.’ Mindfulness just says, ‘I feel anxious now.’ Mindfulness is non-judgemental towards most of our experience (I will explain that ‘most’ in ‘Non-judgemental awareness’ below). So mindfulness doesn’t say, ‘It’s raining and that’s awful, especially because I am walking along the street and that’s awful too.’ Mindfulness says, ‘Look, it’s raining and I’m walking along the street.’ Mindfulness doesn’t bother tying itself up in a knot because it’s raining. Mindfulness doesn’t call you a fool for drifting away into fantasies a thousand times a day. Mindfulness just takes you back into the moment, kindly. It takes a kind interest in your foibles, your faults. Again, there is more on this below under ‘Kindness’.
Mindfulness helps you break free of old patterns of thinking and reacting. It helps you to see the world and yourself in a fresh way every day. Why does this matter? Because so many of our difficulties arise from following old habits of thinking and behaving. And because the ability to take a fresh look at these habits and at our experience broadens our choices enormously. There is more on these old patterns below under ‘Wakening up from the trance’.
For now, think of mindfulness as an intentional and accepting awareness of what I experience right now. The rest of this book is about how to cultivate that awareness and about how mindfulness benefits the human condition.
A NOTE ON HISTORY
Mindfulness as practised today was developed in the Buddhist tradition, but references to what we call mindfulness can be found in earlier Hindu texts. Buddhism made mindfulness central to its practice. In English, the word ‘mindfulness’ has been used since the late nineteenth century to translate the Buddhist concept of intentional and accepting awareness of present moment experience. Psychologists have been interested in mindfulness and in Buddhist psychology in general since the early twentieth century. According to Mark Epstein in Thoughts Without a Thinker, the great American psychologist William James told a Buddhist monk, whom he spotted in the audience while giving a lecture, that ‘This [Buddhism] is the psychology everybody will be studying twenty-five years from now’. James’ timing was out, but as the century progressed concepts from Buddism were increasingly borrowed by the West.
In the Christian tradition, the Bombay-born Jesuit, Anthony de Mello, taught mindfulness at retreats, workshops and through books such as the classic Awareness. His constant admonition to all who listened was to wake up to reality and get in touch with your own self through the cultivation of awareness.
Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School has had a major influence on the acceptance of mindfulness in the health professions through his programme, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, for people suffering chronic pain and stress. Through his books – my favourite is Wherever You Go, There You Are – Kabat-Zinn’s influence has spread far outside the health sector.
Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hahn, has tirelessly promoted the practice of mindfulness from his base at Plum Village in France and through books such as The Miracle of Mindfulness.In the past decade, Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now, has popularised the practice of mindfulness far and wide.
MINDFULNESS IS A PRACTICE – ALWAYS
Mindfulness looks simple: just put your attention on whatever is going on for you right now. Anyone can do it! Well, yes, anyone can if they put the work into it. This appearance of simplicity is deceptive; mindfulness doesn’t come naturally. Try to remain mindful – be intentionally aware of your present moment experience – for just one hour and I know you will find it impossible to do. Actually, try to do it for five minutes and you will probably find you have dipped out of mindfulness and into the imagination a hundred times.
That’s why mindfulness is a practice. As simple as it may look, you must deliberately choose to practise mindfulness every day. It is a journey, not a destination. You will never reach a point at which you will be mindful without effort or intention for the rest of your life. This impossibility of maintaining intentional awareness all the time may have something to do with the ceaseless electrical activity going on in our brains. It may also have something to do with the endless stimulation we receive through our senses. That stimulation continues even when we are asleep, otherwise the sound of a child crying or a phone ringing would have no effect.
As humans, as I will explain elsewhere, we connect one thing to another (see ‘Associations and tags – when labels take over reality’ in the chapter ‘The Moment’). So you try to be mindful as you walk through your house, but there’s that side table in the hall that you got from Aunt Ida when you moved in, and now you’re back in Aunt Ida’s garden as a child and there’s Uncle George smoking his pipe, surrounded by that smell of tobacco you have always associated him with and then remember they had that donkey you used to ride around on ... suddenly you realize what has happened: for a few moments there you fell right out of your mindful state and into a series of linked memories. These memories are stories you tell yourself about your life. They play a role in maintaining your identity. That is why you will go back to them often, even as you practise mindfulness.
However, does the impossibility of remaining permanently mindful condemn us to failure? No, to practise mindfulness you don’t have to be mindful all the time. What matters is to return to awareness again and again. Through returning to intentional awareness again and again we experience the benefits of mindfulness. This explains why practitioners of mindfulness are always warned to avoid reprimanding themselves for drifting away into distraction. You could reprimand all you like and still drift away. So accept that you drift away, then bring yourself back kindly to awareness each time you notice that you have wandered off. That wandering isn’t failure, it’s just the way things are, so accept it. And remember, when you notice you have drifted away, you have already returned to the moment.
A BASIC MINDFULNESS EXERCISE
I recommend a basic mindfulness exercise to people who attend my workshops and to counselling clients. The exercise involves connecting with what your senses bring to you. Cultivating awareness of present moment experience by connecting with your senses has been recommended as a practice for thousands of years, going back to the time of the Buddha. The body is always in the here and now, as Zen teacher Cheri Huber6 has pointed out. Therefore, to take the royal road to mindfulness, practise awareness of what your senses bring you in the moment. Use this basic mindfulness exercise (based on the Buddha’s Four Foundations of Mindfulness), or your own version of it, several times a day to connect you with your here and now experience. Use it also if you feel agitated or bored or when you lie awake at night trying to sleep.
• Begin by noticing your breathing. You don’t have to breathe in any particular way. Just notice your breathing. It might help to notice the breath entering your nostrils or your mouth and leaving again. If your mind drifts into imagination, memory or worries as you do this, just bring it back kindly to noticing your breathing.
• Now notice your posture. Are you sitting, standing, walking, lying down? Just notice.
• Notice your hands. Are your fingers bent or straight? What do your hands feel like? Are they warm or cold? Can you feel a breeze against your skin?
• What about your feet? Can you notice how they feel against your shoes or against the ground?
• Notice sounds. What are the nearest sounds you can hear? What are the furthest-away sounds you can hear?
• Notice your current emotion. Is it pleasant, unpleasant or neutral? Just notice, then back to your breathing.
• Is there a thought in your mind? Just notice, then back to your breathing.
• Now go back to noticing your breathing once more. Again, if your mind drifts into imagination, memory or worries, just bring it back kindly to noticing your breathing.
This basic exercise will take you into mindfulness whenever you do it. It doesn’t matter whether you follow this sequence exactly. All that matters is connecting with your senses from time to time, those senses through which everything you know has been transmitted to you, but which we all so easily ignore in favour of the demands of the mind. Whenever I refer in this book to the basic mindfulness exercise, this is the one I mean. As you see, you can do it walking along a street, sitting at a desk or cooking a meal. Or you can close your eyes and really relax into this exercise. It is also good to do if you are awake in bed at night, but I will have more to say about this in ‘How mindfulness improves your chances of a good night’s sleep’.
Practice
Use this exercise first thing in the morning, a few times during the day and if you are awake in bed at night. It will bring you straight into the mindfulness zone.
ACCEPTANCE – THE HEART OF MINDFULNESS
Mindfulness involves the intentional awareness of your present moment experience. This is the same as saying that mindfulness involves acceptance of your experience, but what does ‘acceptance’ mean? It means that I face, rather than turn my back on, my experiences. In particular, instead of avoiding uncomfortable experiences, I turn towards them.
Let’s say I feel tired following an interrupted night’s sleep. Refusal to accept the tiredness might involve any of the following: cursing my bad luck at the interruptions that left me feeling this way; moaning on and on about how tired I am and how I wanted to be in good shape for today; taking a sleeping pill and going back to bed; and many other possibilities. In this case, a refusal to accept involves tormenting myself in many ways. The fact is, I am tired. In mindfulness, I note this and get on with things as best I can.
Let’s move on to an emotion such as shame. Many people have shame inculcated in them as children – sometimes parents know no better. Because the experience of shame hurts, they may bury their awareness of it or seek to deflect other people’s attention from it, for instance, through anger or boasting. But the unacknowledged shame stays and goes on influencing the person’s life, eating away at their peace of mind. From time to time the shame breaks into awareness. Indeed, practising mindfulness may very well allow this buried feeling to surface.
Non-acceptance of shame may involve drinking to kill it, fighting with other people so as to replace shame with anger or hiding away. The mindfulness approach takes a different attitude. In mindfulness you note that a feeling of shame has emerged. You make no attempt to run away from it. You allow it to stay as you go about your day. You don’t talk to yourself about it or re-run old scenes, but you don’t try to push it away either. If your shame is an old, useless feeling from the past, noticing it in this way will allow it to fade over time, perhaps even to fade away altogether. If you feel shame over something you are doing at present, accepting the feeling allows you to make a choice. Perhaps you feel shame because you are doing the right thing; giving evidence against someone in your social circle who has committed a crime, for instance, may lead to a feeling of shame. Perhaps you feel shame because you are doing something wrong, such as exploiting another person. If I accept the shame, in other words, if I am willing to experience it without running away from it, I can then make a clear choice: give evidence or not; go on exploiting this person or not. Acceptance can lead directly to the realization that I need to take my share of responsibility for what I do next.
Acceptance does not mean indifference to bad behaviour. A week before I began to write this book, I watched news footage of the abuse of men at a prison camp in Russia. The footage distressed me; I expect it will never entirely leave my mind. Both the torment inflicted on the men and the arrogant brutality of the guards reflected aspects of the human experience that most of us don’t want to have to look at. Mindful acceptance does not mean indifference to the suffering of these men or to the behaviour of their tormentors. Mindful acceptance in this case means I accept my feelings of distress as I look at this footage. It means I am willing to experience this distress without having to get rid of the feeling. To get rid of the feeling I might have to deny what is going on, tell myself the beaten men deserve what they get or switch over to a comedy show. However, if I accept my distress then, at the very least, I can be a witness to these men’s suffering, I can be more compassionate in my own behaviour or I can do something like join Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, or perhaps write a letter to my own government asking it to object to the treatment of these prisoners.
Therefore, by accepting my distress, my shame and my tiredness, I influence my own behaviour. Acceptance leads to change and not to indifference. As authors Andrew Christensen and Neil S. Jacobson admirably put it: ‘Change is the brother of acceptance, but it is the younger brother.’
Practice
Notice what you are feeling right now. Can you accept that feeling without getting into a drama in your head about it?
NON-JUDGEMENTAL AWARENESS
When practising mindfulness, take a non-judgemental approach to what reality brings you. By doing so you will see things freshly and make new choices. You will stand a better chance of avoiding the repetition of old habits, perhaps habits of fear or resentment, which no longer have any use. But the non-judgemental approach has its complexities too, as we’ll see as we go along.
Let’s look at this on a simple level first. Consider the weather. People sometimes feel under an obligation to get upset every time the rain falls, especially during the summer. Somewhere along the line they learned this formula: rain equals unhappiness. To make matters worse, if I label an experience as bad then I am more likely to see the negative sides of it than if I label it as good or neutral. If I label a windy, rainy day as ‘bad’ I am more likely to go around hunched up, with a look of dislike on my face than if I label it as ‘interesting’. But if I label it as ‘interesting’ I might notice how the leaves blow in the wind, how rivulets of water run along the street and so on. So, if fora moment you take a non-judgemental approach to the rain, if you suspend your judgement on it, you may find that right now it doesn’t make any great difference to you whether it’s raining or not; you may even find the rain rather interesting or you may realise that you actually feel okay, even though it’s raining.
Let’s say you see a neighbour walking along your street who once shouted at your children when they kicked a ball into his garden and who refused to give the ball back. Every time you see this neighbour your blood pressure goes up. Perhaps you succeed in shortening your life a little every time you meet him. Your children, meanwhile, have either forgotten the whole thing or laugh at the memory. Why not suspend judgement on your neighbour next time you see him? Then at least you spare yourself the grief that goes with resenting this neighbour. You might even prolong your life at the same time!
There are other aspects, though, to this matter of being nonjudgemental. Again, let’s look at the simple ones first.
When I checked my email this morning, it included illustrations of two possible covers for this book. Which cover did I prefer, the publishers wanted to know? If I had emailed back to say, ‘Actually, I am being non-judgemental at the moment, so I’m afraid I can’t help you with this’, we wouldn’t get anywhere. The publishers would make a choice without my input and if I didn’t like what I saw in the end, I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. What being non-judgemental in this situation means to me is to suspend judgement initially while I look at the two different covers, keeping my prejudices out of it. I try to keep away the voice that says this or that colour doesn’t reallygo with mindfulness. I just look at the two covers with as open a mind as I can and allow a view to come to me. Then I choose – I make a judgement, but only after I have allowed myself to look at the options with an open mind.
Another example: a woman wants to buy a dress. Her choice comes down to one of two dresses. One has red stripes and the assistant thinks it suits her very well. However, the woman has a long-standing prejudice against wearing anything with red in it. If she takes a judgemental approach, then, she will say, ‘Well, I never wear red or anything with red in it, so I’ll have the other one’. In this instance an old judgement dictates her choice immediately. If she takes a non-judgemental approach, she can look at the two dresses, well aware of her old prejudice but opening her mind to the possibility that the dress with the red stripes suits her better than the other. Then she can make a judgement, but one based on an unprejudiced consideration of her choices.
So far I have given you fairly trivial examples, so let’s move on to something more serious. Consider the judgements made about the Jews between the First and Second World Wars, judgements of a kind that had been made about them for many centuries, especially in Europe. These judgements ultimately led to the horrors of the concentration camps and death camps. What if enough of those people, who judged the Jews harshly and unthinkingly, had taken a nonjudgemental approach instead, not only in the twentieth century but in the centuries that went before? If a sufficient amount of people could have done that, perhaps those horrors could have been avoided. A non-judgemental attitude can save lives and, if taken by enough people, it can save lives by the million.
Let us suppose now that you are watching television. The camera shows a man taking the hand of a small girl and gently leading her off a beach in a Third World country. The voiceover tells you that this man, a Western tourist, has paid the girl’s family to have sex with her. Where is your non-judgementalism now? Well, you can suspend judgement for a time. You can ask yourself why would this girl’s parents sell her and destroy her life in this way? If it is a question of poverty then should the world, or the government of the country concerned, be doing more to alleviate the hardship of the poor? What contribution can we in the West make to this? If it’s a question of law enforcement, should pressure be applied in that direction? And why is this man free to go to this country and act in this way? Should we, in our country, prosecute men who behave like this abroad? If we have laws allowing for such prosecutions, could we do more to enforce them? Should I contact my politicians or an organisation concerned with this issue to give my support? Just lifting the judgement for a few moments allows you to consider these issues, to inquire into the situation, allowing you to consider what, if anything, you might do about it. On the other hand, a purely judgemental approach might simply lead you to look at this event and say, ‘That’s terrible’, and then go off to make yourself a nice cup of tea to help you forget about it.
A non-judgemental attitude adopted for a time – and you will probably find it’s impossible to adopt it for more than a short time – can actually lead to inquiry and to action. Now let us suppose that you are standing outside a school in your neighbourhood. A woman at the gate is handing out free samples of heroin to the children leaving the school. Is this a case for non-judgemental inquiry? Other parents are as horrified as you. Should you join them in telling this woman to leave and in calling the police? Or should you take a non-judgemental approach and inquire into the ins and outs of what brought this woman here, why a child might take the heroin and how the heroin got here? In my opinion, this is a case in which a moral imperative overcomes nonjudgementalism. In the case of the paedophile you could do nothing immediately. The events depicted perhaps happened six months before they were broadcast. Suspending judgement for a short time may allow you to take some sort of action (demanding a response from politicians, for instance) against this sort of behaviour. In the case of the person distributing heroin outside the school in your presence, you can take action straight away to stop a great harm being done to children. You have arrived at the limits of the nonjudgemental approach. Of course you may later, in a non-judgemental way, consider what might have driven this woman to behave in this way, but that consideration belongs to later.
To sum up, taking a non-judgemental approach does indeed give you a fresh and creative view of the people and events in your own life, and it helps you to make fresh and creative choices. Therefore, 90 per cent of the time, the non-judgemental approach is a particularly valuable element of mindfulness. Of course, we all have to make judgements in day-to-day matters, many times a day, but through suspending judgement for a time we can arrive at better, more rounded judgements in the end.
As we saw in the case of the paedophile above, suspending judgement for a time encourages you to inquire more deeply into situations and into what you might be able to do about them. However, there are some immediate situations in which a moral imperative dictates that the principle of non-judgementalism should be set aside while you act and do what needs to be done. I should end this by acknowledging that this piece is shot through with judgements. Judgementalism is the human condition.
Practice
As you go through your day and as you find yourself disliking what you see and hear, try adopting a non-judgemental approach for a time and see what it teaches you.
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