Getting Uncrossed

I’ve noticed lately that I often wake up at night with my ankles crossed. That might not seem much of a revelation, but I’m working to pay particular attention to the subtle ways I unconsciously tighten, slump and close off my body from its surroundings. I have a tendency to pull away or wall off from unpleasant events, and this expresses itself physically as well as mentally. I’ve found that I can start to undo this habitual pattern by practicing openness, gentleness and letting go of tension. Such as uncrossing my ankles when I wake up at night...

Our society categorizes conditions like depression and anxiety primarily at a mental level. I used to buy into that, believing that if I could only persuade my thinking mind to behave differently, I would no longer be prey to them. I now look at things rather differently, to the point where I no longer use terms like "mental health problems": words and phrases that emphasise well-being as a "head-based" condition don’t much correspond to my experience. Indeed, by crystallizing them into fixed diagnostic criteria, I suspect that, for me at least, they help make a self-perpetuating story out of temporary, sensory data.

I do think depression is a good description of what goes on for me sometimes, although the word has become so associated with "mental illness" that I rarely use that word either. Letting go of that association, "De-pression" evokes the sense of closing down and tightening that I experience in my body when I feel vulnerable to attack. Like a prodded amoeba, I instinctively withdraw to protect myself. Unfortunately, this withdrawal is in itself unpleasant, and most of the things that activate it aren’t solved as a result—it’s an old, habitual reaction that doesn’t serve me.

The practice of mindfulness has revolutionized the way I handle this. I used to panic, frantically ruminating about how I could escape from the pain. I blamed myself for it, fought it, pleaded with it to go away, had it medicated, tried to shake it off or run away from it, and asked other people to remove it. Unfortunately, like a victim of a boa constrictor, I found that every twist and turn seemed to further tighten its hold. The idea that I might accept the feelings of constriction, gently letting them be without trying to strive for a way out, seemed wholly counter-intuitive. However, as I learned to do just this in meditation, I was astonished to find the grip of depression started to loosen by itself.

Nowadays, when I feel my body tightening, I also practice softening, opening up, and breathing into the areas of physical tension, as well as having a sense of offering whatever loving-kindness I can muster to myself and others. It’s not a miracle cure, but gradually I’ve noticed that it seems to help my body feel like a less claustrophobic place to be, even in the midst of inner contraction. It also seems to shorten the time-span of the depressive episode.

My thinking has changed too—it’s much less often that I beat myself up with negative self-talk, but the body patterns seems to come from a deeper level—more ancient, more deeply ingrained (this is perhaps not surprising, given that emotional reactions are driven by the limbic system, which evolved earlier than the rational, thinking parts of our brain).

Attention to the body is a key mindfulness practice, and yet it’s something that most of us in the West continue to resist. How instructive it is that we use the word mindfulness in English, when in many Eastern traditions the equivalent terms might be better translated as heartfulness. Even with meditation practice, we don’t want to feel our hearts, to be in our bodies. We reify the mind and the brain, and yet most of our experience happens below the neck.

That’s why what I’m doing nowadays is as much bodyfulness as mindfulness. Remembering to uncross my ankles, drop my shoulders, open my chest, uplift my spine and ground my feet have had as much, if not more impact on my life as letting go of self-critical thinking. These practices not only bring awareness back into my body, helping restore balance to my being, but they seem to be loosening the bonds of habitual depression on a very physical level.

What’s your experience of the body dimension in mental health and mindfulness? You’d be very welcome to share comments below...

Mindfulness and Youth: To dot-be or not to dot-be?

It’s estimated (conservatively) that one in ten children in the United States would qualify for a diagnosis of Attention Hyperactivty Disorder. We live in an age of "continuous partial attention," where the constant pressure to react to a flood of stimuli goes beyond the reasonable capacities of our brains. We know that young, growing brains are especially vulnerable to being shaped by negative experience—a scattered attention can create a brain in disharmony, which may further impede our ability to focus. And a mind that can’t sustain focus is a mind that will find it difficult to learn something new.

Given all this, you might think training in attention would be critical to any schooling. Indeed, William James, back in 1890, said such a training would be "an education par excellence," although he confessed to being stumped as to what it might involve. Now, of course, we know—mindfulness practice nurtures attention, bringing with it a precious treasure of other well-being benefits. And yet, it seems that most of our educators remain unmoved by the power of meditation—like James over a century ago, schools know the importance of attention, but are less sure of methods to bring it about.

I was delighted to attend the second Mindfulness in Schools Conference here in the UK a couple of weeks ago. The event, at Tonbridge School, clarified both the challenges and rewards of introducing mindfulness to our youth. The conference was organised by Chris Cullen, Richard Burnett and Chris O’Neill, three intrepid teachers who have developed a superb mindfulness program for teenage students, which is now being used in a small but growing number of schools around the country.

The nine-week course skilfully adapts key meditation practices to appeal to young people—there’s beditation (a body scan), FOFBOC (Feet on Floor, Bum on Chair), 7/11 (breathe in for 7 seconds, out for 11) and .b (dot-b), which is the two-character text message that pupils send and receive as the cue for a breathing space. There’s also multimedia content from films like Kung Fu Panda.

Perhaps the most moving testimonies at the conference came from students who’d taken the course, and who reported feeling less awkward in social situations, more motivated but not as stressed when it came to exams, better sleep and even less acne. One 17-year-old was already looking at the big picture when she suggested mindfulness could lead to “less bullying, better grades, and calmer teachers.”

It was also illuminating to hear of resistance to the classes (which in one school was offered, somewhat comically, as a "games" option). Chris O’Neill summed up the quizzical reaction of some school authorities, who viewed the lessons as “a cross between witchcraft and maypole dancing,” even though pilot studies (supervised by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge) are validating some of the pupil reports with hard data. Professor Felicia Huppert, director of the Cambridge Well-Being Centre and happiness advisor to the UK government, said that mindfulness is the most important skill to teach kids if we want to help them flourish.

To understand the cynicism, maybe we should heed the cynic. Another conference speaker, Tim Parks, is the author of Teach Us To Sit Still, a memoir of his reluctant adventure into the realm of meditation as a last-ditch attempt to manage chronic pelvic pain. He described the practice of asking kids to feel their feet as “a radical act.” In a school system that cultivates head-based intellect as the way to reach goals and targets, offering lessons in mindfulness is nothing short of subversive, mused Parks. What would happen when these children heard the message from their bodies that perhaps they didn’t want to spend their lives on the materialistic treadmill that society has laid out for them?

Parks spoke of his own past: “My body and mind were just about on speaking terms, with the former mainly an accessory for furthering my career.” When pain led him to explore "paradoxical relaxation" techniques, he reported feeling furious at the suggestion that he was practising meditation. “I’m not the kind of guy who meditated,” he deadpanned.

In the main, we’re not the kind of society that meditates, and certainly not the kind that teaches it to our children. After all, they might grow up to decide that the social and economic structures we’ve built and preserved don’t offer  the well-being  they really yearn for. Feet on floor, bum on chair. Dot-be. Beditation. It sounds almost like... well, a sit-in. Best get the kids back to math class, hadn’t we?

Making a business case for mindfulness

With stress-related illness draining the coffers at many organisations, and the advantage to companies of attentive, resilient staff, you might think the workplace was fertile ground for mindfulness training. But while there have indeed been somepioneering programs, meditation in most business settings has yet to really take off, especially when compared to a sector like healthcare.

Employers aren’t easily convinced that investing in stillness, openness and gentleness will improve productivity. We’ve come to associate business withbusyness, and slowing down to notice more can seem at odds with a corporate culture of speed and acquisition.

Yet this is actually what makes mindfulness so valuable in a business context. Workers are human beings, and we function better when we feel centered—all the anxious multi-tasking and plate-spinning doesn’t actually do us or our work any good. Unfortunately, when a culture of grasping and aggression is entrenched, it takes a skillful approach to magnetise people to something different.

My colleague Michael Chaskalson offers such an approach in his new book The Mindful Workplace: Developing Resilient Individuals and Resonant Organisations with MBSR (Wiley-Blackwell). As a mindful business specialist, Michael knows the language of the corporate world, and he persuades by making a business case for mindfulness. Far from being a hindrance to productivity, Michael shows how mindfully paying attention is crucial to it, a vital asset to the creativity, emotional intelligence and relationship-building finesse that characterises successful enterprise. His book is a skilful weaving together of art, science and practice, presented with clarity, simplicity and warmth.

The business case he sets out is straightforward. Stress in the workplace is at epidemic levels, costing businesses an estimated $2,800 per employee every year. Meanwhile, taking a mindfulness course at work significantly reduces days off due to stress (by 70 percent over three years, according to one case study, in which a mindfulness course was offered to staff at Transport for London, the large company that runs the English capital’s subway network).

Taking a mindfulness course at work has also been shown to facilitate a shift in neural functioning towards states associated with positivity, creativity and well-being, and away from defensiveness and depression, as well as strengthening the immune system. There is now hard science that meditation training can lead to happier, healthier and more engaged people, and happier, healthier, engaged people tend to make good coworkers.

This may sound like a no-brainer, but it’s easy to underestimate resistance to mindfulness being offered in a workplace setting (for example, here's how the offer of a program was received by one individual). Corporate cultures are driven by results, and only by exploring, understanding and explaining how mindfulness can deliver those results can it hope for a warm welcome.

The challenge is great: mindfulness is incompatible with an approach to work that prioritises profit over people, getting ahead over being here now, cut-throat deals over kindly awareness. But the promise is great too: in time, mindfulness could bring something much deeper than a patching over of job stress. It has the potential to transform the way we traditionally do business itself, shifting the balance from competition to collaboration, and from grasping to offering, helping us let go of the tension that comes from pursuing profit-based goals at the expense of human well-being.

The task is to convince that greater success can stem from a set of values that are not traditionally associated with a business temperament. It takes a brave employer to risk going against the stream by advocating values that are seen as soft or weak, which is why continuing to build a scientific case for a mindful workplace is so vital. We need an answer to the charge of fluffiness that speaks the language of the business world as it exists today. Evidence of better results and more creative people is a pretty good start, as is a book that sets them out so lucidly.

Waking up is hard to do—but that's OK

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been catching up on streaming videos fromCreating A Mindful Society, the Mindful.org-sponsored event which took place in New York last month. Two segments stood out for me. The first was Richie Davidson’s brilliant keynote on the neuroscience of meditation—a clear and cogent outline of what happens in our brains as we train in presence and kindness. The second was a discussion of why, twenty years after publication of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s seminal book, Full Catastrophe Living, and with so much evidence pointing towards the benefits, mindfulness practice hasn’t yet become a part of most people’s lives.

There were several interesting takes on this, including Kabat-Zinn’s own call for patience—he talked in terms of a thousand-year unfolding—and Davidson’s reminder that in spite of all the remarkable data, we are far from convincing the scientific mainstream that meditation is a valuable thing to do.

But even if the science were unquestioned and the political and social atmosphere ripe, perhaps we shouldn’t expect mindfulness to be met with an unqualified, widespread embrace. I say this because meditation can be difficult, unpleasant, andscary. That’s not to put people off, but to acknowledge that it means coming to terms with not just the stuff we like (calm, ease, freedom, flow), but also the stuff we don’t like (pain, anger, death, loss of control). When we practice mindfulness, we’re changing our habitual pattern of relating (hold on to the "good" stuff, and push away the "bad"). Indeed, we’re exploring the possibility of giving up our preconceived judgments about what is good and bad. I’m reminded of a meditation teacher who once told me: “It’s not about trying to sniff the roses, or avoiding the smell of manure, so much as appreciating that we have a nose.”

When we look at the remarkable scientific results, and hear stories of increased well-being from practitioners, it’s easy to forget that these changes usually reflect a letting go of established ways of seeing and doing in the world, a gradual coming to accept that they don’t serve us as we had imagined. Mindfulness practice opens us up to the expanse of who we are, the reality of our lives. This, as Kabat-Zinn says, means being willing to own the Full Catastrophe, the pain as well as the pleasure.

Now that’s not easy. And if you don’t feel like you’re really suffering or struggling, you may not be up for such a shift in perspective. Even those of us who’ve committed to this awakening can find it so uncomfortable that we repeatedly resist the bright light that meditation shines on our lives.

Around the middle weeks of a mindfulness  course, there’s often a dawning among participants that what we’re engaged with is not "nicey, nicey," a band-aid to stick on as protection from discomfort. In fact, we’re  ripping off the band-aid and exposing our wounds to the air. By doing this in the context of meditation, which offers a gentle holding space for this to happen, we sometimes discover that we can tolerate our troubles and work with them in a way that brings a more profound well-being than some kind of Polyanna-ish positive thinking.

But waking up is hard to do. Not everyone wants to take the red pill. It’s fine to acknowledge this—indeed, if we become evangelical about mindfulness, wanting everyone to take to it with unquestioning enthusiasm, then we’ve become trapped in desire. If we fail to acknowledge the difficulties of meditation, then we are burying our heads in the sand of ignorance and aversion, and perhaps offering a picture of the practice to others that may not be genuine. As ever, the best way to see the change we yearn for is to be it, to magnetise others through our embodiment, rather than just through our advocacy. This may mean a slower embrace of mindfulness in our world, but, maybe, a deeper and more transformative one.

Getting results from mindfulness...and letting go of them

Barely a week goes by without some new clinical trial showing how programs which teach mindfulness can help people minimize suffering and enhance their well-being. Whether it be through reducing stress, managing illness, boosting the immune system or moving away from addictive habits, science is confirming what meditators have reported for thousands of years—that mindfulness is beneficial in a wide range of ways. At the same time, it's important not to get carried away by all the data, sucked into viewing meditation as a quick-fix solution.

To fall into this goal-oriented mindset is to fundamentally misunderstand what meditation is, and how it helps. Indeed, expecting meditation to “make me better,” perhaps based on the results of clinical studies, may well sabotage the practice, whose benefit comes partly from letting go of the tendency to grasp for results.

In the UK, psychologists have positioned mindfulness within the cognitive-behavioral tradition, and there are similarities—like CBT, mindfulness offers a practical set of skills that can help people relate more effectively to their thoughts and feelings. But whereas CBT is primarily a change-focused approach, mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy show us how to let go of struggling for change. Their magic lies in enabling us making peace with who and where we are, right now, in this moment.

This attitude draws on ideas and practices that have several thousand years of history and tradition behind them, and which have usually been advocated as part of a system of meditative training designed to facilitate a deep transformation in the way we experience ourselves, others and the world. A fundamental premise of this training is that we are already basically OK—we don't need to “try” to get better, we just need to learn how to uncover and be who we really are. Curiously, adopting this attitude of deep and radical acceptance often seems to produce some of the change we were seeking. So, there's a paradox: mindfulness can change us, and can lead to effective change, but while this takes effort, it doesn't come from striving. Indeed, striving can actually be a form of self-aggression, which just creates more misery.

Mindfulness practice, then, is not so much a tool for self-improvement, but more a way of relating to our lives in a spirit of awareness, openness and kindness. Jon Kabat-Zinn, creator of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, recently said that “mindfulness is not a technique. It is a way of being, a way of seeing, a way of knowing.” It nurtures a process of unfolding, of allowing things to settle, so that that well-being might emerge from coming into flow with how things are, even when that isn't how we'd like them to be. It's true that this kind of awareness can be the ground for more skillful decision-making and behavior—but when we can let go of the tension created by struggling to be better or healthier, the need for our problems to have a 'cure'—even if one were possible—no longer seems quite so relevant. And at that point we might start to feel a whole lot better.

Society's Perception of Meditation

Imagine going to your local doctor and suddenly discovering a shamanic healer has been made partner in the practice. Not only that, but all the conventional doctors are referring their most difficult cases to him, murmuring reverentially about his evidence-based magic skills. It would seem pretty surprising, no?

Well, that's about the size of the seismic shift that's taking place in our culture's perception of meditation. In 1970, or even 2001, a meditating politician, teacher or policeman in the West would probably have deemed it prudent to keep their practice a secret, for fear of public ridicule—now we have openly mindful congressmen (see video below) and parliamentarians, and meditation is enthusiastically championed in government reports, school curricula and a vast range of other establishment settings.

There's little question that scientific research has been the driver for this remarkable transformation. Scientific data is the gold standard for validity in our society, and a robust body of research pointing to effectiveness cuts like a sharp knife through bloated old assumptions, especially given that meditation has tended to get lumped in with 'unscientific' approaches such as alternative therapy and religion. If you're able to explain how mindfulness cultivates awareness and compassion in terms of mirror neurons (as Mark Matousek, author of the newly-released Ethical Wisdom, does in this recent interview), it creates the potential for connecting with a certain demographic in a way that asking them to trust their intuition doesn't. And if that's enough to get people past the cliches about self-indulgent hippies and actually into meditation, then that's wonderful—with practice, there's a greater chance they'll trust their intuition soon too.

There are risks in approaching mindfulness as a science. Research study results can seem cut and dried, as if all you have to do to garner the benefits is rock up to an eight-week course and wait for inevitable serenity to arise. As anyone who's ever sat down to meditate knows, it doesn't quite work like that. And there's that tricky word 'benefits' too, mention of which can lurch many of us into patterns of goal-seeking that can actually sabotage our practice, which requires working patiently at re-connecting to the present moment, and letting go of striving for future gain. Science can be a heady affair, too, all cognitive and clinical, whereas the art of mindfulness practice is embodied and messy. Manual labour, as Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to call it.

I think we're gradually stumbling towards a middle way, and the term contemplative science (with all that it implies) has a lot to offer. While science is a third person process of investigation and observation (you do the experiment on others, keep yourself out of it as much as possible, and watch the results), the contemplation process balances this with a first-person perspective (you do the experiment on yourself, engage with it as fully as you can, and watch the results). A contemplative scientist needs to be proficient in both approaches, and willing to give weight to the evidence that comes from each view.

As practitioner-researchers, many of those working in the mindfulness field can already lay just claim to such a title, which is perhaps why so much high quality work is starting to get done. The scientist or clinician who recommends practice but doesn't engage with it is liable to be much less effective, while the meditator with no mainstream credentials will have trouble connecting with a secular audience.

It's interesting to see religion-bashers like Sam Harris giving mindfulness instructions and espousing contemplative science (albeit in rather an intellectual and defensive way, which you could argue somewhat misses the point). It suggests there is some meeting place where positivists can dialogue creatively with more noetic or even religious souls.

“Wisdom is inclusive, expansive, and non-sectarian by definition,” says Mark Matousek in the above-mentioned interview. Yes indeed—and mindfulness itself is a key to finding some way to that wisdom, as it means daring to peer into our own presumptions and engage gracefully with those who disagree with us. If we can do that, it looks an interesting road ahead, for meditation and for science.

Go forth and flashmob

At 6:34 p.m. on Thursday, June 2, several hundred people quietly strolled between the fountains in London's Trafalgar Square, sat down together, and began to meditate. They remained seated on the ground in the crisp summer sunshine for almost half an hour, before getting up again and going their separate ways. The English capital had just played host to its first meditation flashmob. 

For those who aren't in the know, flashmobs are gatherings of people who meet up to perform apparently spontaneous and unusual acts in public, and like most, this one was organised over the internet.  A Facebook page gave the time, place and instructions, and word spread through online social networks. By the day of the event, more than 500 people had signed up, and from the looks of this video, most of them were actually there. Organizer Elina Pen says she was "astonished" at the level of interest, describing it as "a wonderful 30 minutes of serenity amidst the busyness of Central London..."

Meditation flashmobs have been springing up across the United States and elsewhere over the last year or so, and June 2nd's might have been the largest yet. There's something of a movement happening—websites such as Medmob are promoting the sit-ins, and while many flashmobs thrive on a sense of absurdity or lack of explicit purpose, the meditation variety seem grounded in an underlying ethos—to normalize practice through bringing people together and supporting them to sit in public spaces, and by piquing the interest of bystanders.

There's an enduring misconception in some quarters that meditation is a purely personal, even self-centred act. It's in part a hangover from its associations with the hippie and new-age/alternative scene, both of which have sometimes been accused of promoting narcissism, with an over-involved focus on "me" and "my" development. So it's refreshing when practice is explicitly undertaken as social experiment, designed not just for individual gain but to make an offering and invitation to others.

Flashmobs are good art, too. At a time when the primary mover in promoting the virtues of meditation is scientific research and medical protocol, it's nice to see meditators injecting some joie de vivre into the fray—if the Trafalgar Square sitters didn't persuade onlookers to take up mind training, they at least gave them a decent spectacle, an unexpected memento from their day to treasure and laugh about when they got home. And maybe one or two did get inspired by seeing a large bunch of strangers (wearing everything from saffron robes to business suits) suddenly and simultanousely parking their arses in one of England's premier tourist spots.

There will be scoffers, for sure—staying silent and engaging with one's inner environment are still viewed as suspicious behaviour in sections of our go-getting, externally-focused culture. Meditation practice ("doing nothing") and social action may even be seen as incompatible, despite the fact that observing one's own mind stream can often be the first step to more skillful, empathic and compassionate relationships. If meditation doesn't lead to greater social responsibility, we probably aren't doing it right.

The flashmob groundswell is growing. Anyone can organize a local event, and if you're looking for solidarity and support, Medmob are working to inspire loosely co-ordinated events around the world, with a monthly event planned for the last Sunday of each month. (And another meditation flashmob took place this evening, in London.) So for the benefit of all, go forth and flashmob...

Waking Up to Mindfulness

Ten years ago last March, I decided to seek help for my mind. It was near the beginning of a third (and most crippling) episode of anxiety and depression, and I realized that whatever the outer circumstances behind my despair, resolution had to come from within.

Swamped by distressing thoughts and feelings, I felt there must be a way to manage this inner turmoil. The question was, how? Normally, I would use my mind to solve problems in life—but now my mind was the problem in life. Something different was needed, but I'd no real idea what that something might be.

I found myself embarking on a self-help odyssey. In psychotherapy, I explored why my mind was how it was, and gained useful insights into some habitual patterns and tendencies. But I remained acutely depressed and tense, nowhere near discovering how to manage the unrelenting onslaught of negativity and emotional pain. I read a mountain of psychology books, and went to support groups, alternative therapists, and even a psychic—each to little or no avail. Having tried antidepressants, increasingly desperate visits to the GP were also proving fruitless.

It was about two years into this journey that my therapist suggested learning to meditate. It took me several months to act on this advice, but doing so changed my life. I discovered a meditation center five minutes' walk from my home, and the instructors there were kind and helpful. Too strung-out to sit for long periods, I was advised to begin with "mindful tea-drinking" (just sit and notice the experience of lifting the cup, tasting the tea, putting the cup down again), and perhaps five minutes a day of focusing on the breath. This felt torturous at first—suddenly there was no distraction from my raging mind and body—but at the same time, I sensed some magic happening. I started to notice a part of me that wasn't consumed by depression and fear, and that there was a way to sit still—even peacefully—through deep difficulty. So began a love affair with meditation that continues to this day—I've discovered no better way to work with life than this gentle, precise, liberating practice.

A lot has changed in the last decade. Here in the UK, around 70% of family doctors believe mindfulness meditation would be helpful for their patients, and some even have government-funded courses they can refer people to. Mindfulness-based stress reduction is available in most areas, and  newspapers regularly report on meditation's effectiveness for conditions such as depression, chronic pain and addiction. Scientific literature on the subject has exploded: until 2003 there were less than 50 mindfulness research studies a year, while in 2010 this had mushroomed to more than three hundred and fifty. We are learning more and more how meditation practice can be beneficial for the brain, help with illness, and enable us to reach our human potential.

Mindfulness programs are thriving in schools, workplaces, and most other settings where people congregate. Major health charities and government agencies are recommending mindfulness, dozens of books on the subject are published each year, and people who might never have previously encountered meditation are beginning to seek out instruction as a way to manage lives that often seem frenetic or out of control.

The world seems to be waking up to mindfulness. For those of us who believe meditation can bring healing to many of our individual and social wounds, these are exciting times. I'll do my best to chronicle this fledgling process of awakening here,  however it continues to emerge. I'll report on the burgeoning science and practice of mindfulness in our 21st century culture—how it grows, develops and transforms. I'll try to highlight areas of interest and concern to practitioners, and warmly invite you to offer your comments too. And because mindfulness requires engagement as well as observation, I hope you'll indulge me if I say some more about my own experience of meditation—some of the joys and obstacles that are part of what seems to be an ever-unfolding practice. I'd be delighted if you shared your stories too...

Please note that in this space, you will also see pieces I’ve written before the blog started, which have been placed here to make it possible to see the work I’ve done that’s already appeared in Mindful.