Not a typical manifesto, but a manifesto all the same

When people hear that I’ve co-written a book called The Mindful Manifesto, they sometimes approach me with questions about the title, such as: “Manifesto? Do you mean that meditation is a party political act?,” or “Isn't a manifesto all about action and meditation all about sitting still?”

These are good questions, and there is an interesting relationship between the practice of mindfulness, which involves making space to observe the patterns of experience without getting caught up in them, and living life in an engaged and compassionate way.

In the book, Jonty Heaversedge and I argue that practicing meditation is a skillful way to cultivate well-being—both personal and social. If we can learn to watch the flow of our own thoughts, feelings, habits and biases, seeing them with ever-greater clarity, then we are in a good position to bring that understanding to act more wisely in our lives. By taking time out to do less, our actions are more likely to be skillful. It’s a bit like the instructions to put your own oxygen mask on first in an airplane emergency—that apparently selfish action allows us to help others more effectively.

The word “manifesto” derives from the Latin verb manifestare, which means “to show plainly.” In English, to manifest means “to become apparent.” Our suggestion is that by learning how to be, we might start to release a wisdom that can show us plainly how things are, and that this might form the ground for knowing what to do.

By using the word manifesto in this way, we are hoping to reclaim its true meaning—not so much a plan of action, but a call to being. So it isn’t the usual kind of manifesto—there’s no great scheme to solve all our problems instantly. Instead, it’s an invitation to let go of doing, at least for a time, and learn how to be. This, we suggest, could make a real difference to our well-being, not just as individuals, but as couples, families, communities, nations—and as a planet. Whether it’s relationship issues, an unhealthy addiction, or the threat of war, we can create space for choices to emerge.

By working with meditation, we deliberately and gently bring more awareness to our experience. Gradually, as we pay attention, we begin to notice how we get caught up on automatic pilot, unconsciously playing out patterns that create stress and suffering. We learn to tolerate our impulse to follow patterns that don’t serve us. We cultivate a gap between thought and action, and gradually, as we become more skilled in our practice, the ability to dwell in this gap grows, and we are impelled less and less into knee-jerk reactions.

Mindfulness is simple to learn, and a growing body of scientific research shows it can help with many different issues. From working with stress, anxiety and depression and helping us look after our physical health, to letting go of unskillful behavior patterns and nurturing our relationships with others, as well as fostering greater health and happiness in our schools, workplaces and other community settings, there doesn’t seem to be any situation in which more mindfulness wouldn’t be useful.

It can be practiced on the bus, in the supermarket, at your desk, or in bed. You don’t need special equipment—just your mind and body. And while proficiency takes work, you don’t have to spend years meditating in an ashram or monastery to make a difference—according to one study, less than a week’s practice of 20 minutes a day can be enough to start producing measurable shifts. This then, is what we mean by a mindful manifesto—not a pre-defined program of action, but an opportunity for wisdom to manifest in each moment.

In the next few blogs, I’ll be sharing a few extracts from the book, exploring the science, art and practice of mindfulness, and suggesting how it can help in a range of life situations.

How connecting with yourself also helps you connect with others

When I started meditating, I thought it was all about me.  I felt stressed, my mind was chaotic, panic was overwhelming my body, I needed something to calm medown. I was highly focused on myself and my problems, and I saw meditation as something that might help me cope. It has helped me cope, but increasingly this has happened not just through allowing me to work more skilfully with my internal experience, but by expanding my capacity to be and stay in relationship with others. Opening up to a wider space of awareness and connection, via the practice of mindfulness, has made it a lot less claustrophobic in here.

This expansion seems to have happened quite organically. First I began to discover that my automatic patterns of reacting to events weren’t just happening in my inner space—the thoughts, emotions and body sensations I was having also impacted on how I operated in the world. When I felt angry with someone, I’d instinctively avoid them, amoeba-like, pulling out of connection and into isolation. In meditation, I began to see this pattern clearly.

Withdrawal can be a way of not getting hurt in the short term, but it tends to make for a somewhat lonely and limited existence. The more we contract our awareness, tighten our muscles and pull away from others, the less room there is to breathe. Opening out is risky—we’re becoming willing to make ourselves vulnerable—but it’s the only way to go for genuine contentment. As I started to notice my own isolating tendencies, I began to explore the possibility of staying present to, rather than acting on those instinctive reactions, and opting for a different  response—that of maintaining connection. Mindfulness has helped me with that, too.

There’s been a persistent idea in our world that meditation means cloistering ourselves from the world, probably because we see so many images of people practicing on their own, with their eyes closed, apparently not in contact with those around them. What we don’t see, of course, is those same people getting up from their formal practice and using the awareness they’ve been cultivating to relate more empathically and kindly with others.

It’s good to see this misconception being challenged more regularly, especially as there’s plenty of solid research suggesting that meditation can increase our ability to relate with others. There’s also now an excellent guide to this new science and practice of mindfulness as it applies to relationships—Marsha Lucas’s book Rewire Your Brain For Love.

For a non-specialist, trying to understand the implication for our relationships of different bits of the brain growing, shrinking, firing and wiring can seem a bit like trying to enjoy a good film by going to inspect the projector, so it’s a testament to Marsha’s book that I came away feeling that it really was valuable to know what my amygdala is doing (or not doing) when I’m drawn to isolate, and how I can learn to respond in a way that would engage my orbito-medial prefrontal cortex more effectively. Rewire Your Brain For Love is a training program for the brain that leads to a more fulfilling experience of the heart, with mindfulness practice at the core of the curriculum.

Taking a physiological approach to what’s happening in our relationships seems to have the welcome effect of empowering us to understand and change them. We can see that it’s not our personal failing that we get angry, hurt and confused, and that we misinterpret our loved ones and their actions—it’s simply part of our shared human heritage. The great news about the science of mindfulness is that it shows we don’t have to be totally enslaved to our patterns—the brain is far more plastic than we once thought, and meditation can help us rewire it in the direction of fulfilling connection with others.

I haven’t had the privilege of before and after scans to see what’s happening in my own brain, but I do know that in the ten years I’ve been practicing, my relationships have shifted from the non-existent or fractious gradually towards ever-greater degrees of closeness. I’m about to celebrate a second wedding anniversary, and I feel a deep, loving bond with both my wife and eight-month-old son, and a stronger and growing sense of connection with family, friends, colleagues and community. A decade ago, I couldn’t imagine such a situation.

Hopefully, there will soon be more studies and more books like Marsha’s that show how mindfulness helps us approach and enjoy fulfilling relationships. And they will encourage more people like me to engage with this liberating practice—not just for themselves, but for their loved ones, and indeed, for the world at large.

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?