We can do better than a "bit of mindfulness"

Last month I spent a rich and rewarding week on a training retreat for teachers, run by Bangor University’s dedicated mindfulness centre. Glorious Welsh mountains provided the backdrop for our practice (not hard to find inspiration for embodying stillness, steadiness and strength here), while sharing in the wisdom of so many experienced guides made for a fertile learning environment. I felt a deep sense of commitment in the group to offering, as best we can, skillful spaces for people to experience the magic of mindfulness.

A phrase that struck me during the retreat—and it is one I’ve heard many times as meditation-based approaches have spread across the helping professions —is "a bit of mindfulness." People reading "a bit of mindfulness." Therapists using "a bit of mindfulness." Businesses bringing in "a bit of mindfulness" for their staff. Of course, it’s wonderful that practicing meditation is widely respected these days, rather than an implicit admission of borderline insanity, but there’s something about this phrase, and what it implies, that leaves me uneasy.

"A bit of mindfulness" suggests that mindfulness can be separated off, like a plaster to be applied when situations require calm, concentration, or a checking-in with our internal barometer. (And which, by extension, can then be forgotten about, as we get on with the rest of our lives.) While it's true that studies suggest there is value in meditating for a short period of time, over just a few days, I still sense that "a bit of mindfulness" is just what it says—a very small part of something much wider, deeper and potentially transformative.

In his most recent book Minding Closely, the scholar and scientist Alan Wallace offers a view of mindfulness so vast that it could take many lifetimes just to scratch its surface. It’s the most comprehensive book on the subject I’ve ever had the pleasure to read, although with its patient exploration of traditional Buddhist teachings,  intertwined with insights from western psychology and physics, it probably isn’t for everyone, at least not as a starting point. What it points to, and what could be missed in a rush to throw "mindfulness" at anything and everything, is there’s a well-plumbed depth to these practices that we’d be wise to attend to, and learn from.

One of the reasons why mindfulness is having such an impact through the world is that it is both simple and revolutionary. It offers so much, and yet it isn’t complicated (although it is challenging). However, if it is to permeate the fabric of our society, rather than just spill on its surface, we can’t take the easy route of presenting meditation as a mere technique, a quick fix for speed and distraction. If we do, its benefits will probably be marginal.

This is a tricky road to navigate: we can come across like the mindfulness police, or a child whose toy is being stolen and broken by the other kids. That won’t do either—it really is wonderful that so many people are learning how to open up to the present moment, with all the joys and difficulties that brings. The task of mindfulness teachers, somehow, is to gently uphold the integrity of the practices with which we are entrusted, to open ourselves to a continual deepening of our own embodiment of them, and to cultivate the conditions in which others can enjoy that same opportunity. That way, our own "bit of mindfulness" can gradually grow into our own "life of mindfulness." Then those we come into contact with might get a glimpse or more of how this journey can unfold.

A week of unfolding in the Welsh hills has expanded my "bit": by calling me back into a regular running practice, helping me cultivate the confidence to be more spacious and inquiring in my teaching, and leading me into closer community with amazing people who are making this their life’s work. For that, I’m enormously grateful.

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.