6 Reasons Why Mindfulness Begins with the Breath

It’s good to be curious about why we practise mindfulness of breathing, but just because we experience some discomfort during the practice doesn’t mean it’s not helpful. In fact, perhaps it’s helpful partly because the breath shows us our discomfort, and the patterns of relationship that perpetuate it. Rather than immediately looking for a more exciting mindfulness practice, we might like to consider possible benefits of staying with the breath. Here are a few to ponder:“My breath is boring—just the same thing over and over again. Surely there must be something more interesting to watch?” This kind of comment comes up quite often when people start mindfulness training. While there are a lot of usefulinformal mindfulness practices being offered out there—like savoring a snack or the walk home—there's a good case to be made for cultivating a formal mindfulness practice, which involves learning a basic mindfulness meditation such as following the breath and practicing it on a regular, preferably daily, schedule.

1. The breath doesn’t try to get anywhere. In and out. In and out. The breath isn’t focused on improving style, becoming more efficient, or rushing to reach the end of some daily respiration quota in order to take a break. As long as we let it, the breath mostly just does what it does. Of course, there is something very vital happening when we breathe—without it we die—but trying to speed it up, force it, grasp it, push it away or control it tends to get in the way. As in breathing, so in life—we can learn a lot from the natural rhythm, pace, and un-fussiness of the way breath continues its work, without making a big deal out of it.

2. The breath teaches us steadfastness. Much of the time the mind is wandering, either drawn to focus, ruminate, or push away unpleasant experiences, or chasing after stuff we like. But if we don’t practise being still, we are prone to get blown about by every wind, buffeted by the ups and downs of life. By training to pay attention precisely and gently to the breath, coming back again and again, we cultivate a resilience that allows us to be present when difficulty and temptation arises. Distractions still come, but we don’t get so lost in them. This is a master key to well-being, and the boring old breath offers a simple, regular, and available tool to practise with and learn from.

3. The breath happens in the body. For those of us accustomed to experiencing everything from our heads, the breath invites us to a lower centre of gravity. We let go of thinking for a time, and come down to the belly. We feel the texture of the breath, its rising and falling, and the physical sensations of movement that accompany it. This helps synchronise body and mind, bringing us more into a mode of present-moment sensing. When we feel the breath, we feel the essence of being alive. This often feels good, even if we’re having a hard time. As Jon Kabat-Zinn says: “If you’re breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong.”

4. The breath isn’t really that boring. Are you paying attention to the breath, or just your idea of how it is, should or shouldn’t be? Is this breath really the same as the last one, or subtly different, in duration, texture, and intensity? When you open to the actual sensations of breathing, is it really so tedious? Isn’t it rather remarkable and wonderful that we are kept alive in each moment through this mysterious process of inhalation and exhalation, of oxygenation and blood pumping, of the air reaching all the cells of the body. Isn’t it amazing that there’s air to breathe, a body to take it in, and a mind to watch it? Each moment we’re interested in the process of breathing, we are training ourselves in curiosity. Maybe other so-called boring aspects of life contain jewels that we miss and dismiss too hastily?

5. You don’t breathe. The breath breathes. You are not in charge of your breathing, or at least, not so much. Yes, you could hold your breath (for a while) and you could choose to breathe deliberately fast and shallow for a time, but fairly soon any attempt to force the breath will produce counter-measures from within. At the same time, with practice, it’s possible to learn to align with the breath, gently moving with it, while allowing space for it to come into its own natural depth, pace, and flow.Things seem to go best when we co-operate with the breath, rather than resisting or clinging to it. This is good training for the rest of life, over which we also have only partial control.

6. The breath invites us to rest and recuperate. When early humans were faced with a predator attack, the breath would quicken and the muscles would tense in preparation for fight or flight. If the attack was survived, there would follow a period of rest and recuperation, as the breath slowed down and the body returned to balance. The same reactions occur in us today, except many threats we face are chronic and ongoing (stressful jobs, noisy neighbours, long-term illness etc) and our bodies may not get much chance to come back to balance. The stillness and space of mindfulness of breathing allows us to move into recovery mode, as we take some time out from the frenetic pace of activity or worry that many of us live with. Regular attention to the breath could save us from overheating and breakdown.

Can Mindfulness Transform Politics?

More on the new All-Party Parliamentary Group on Mindfulness in the UK.

It was an arresting occasion partly due to the setting—we are perhaps getting used to meditation happening in health centres, private businesses, even schools—but here it was being practised and taken seriously in the symbol of the British establishment, by politicians from all three main parties, offered up as a way to approach some of the most pressing social issues of our time. I think it’s fair to say that the days of mindfulness being seen as something new agey or alternative are coming to an end.The Labour MP Chris Ruane described it as a seminal moment, and it was certainly a startling one for many. In a packed Committee Room at the House of Commons last Wednesday, with 28 MPs and Lords in attendance, a UK all-party Parliamentary Group on Mindfulness was launched.

The content of the event was also remarkable. Speaker after speaker gave testimony about the benefits of mindfulness practice, covering wide ground—there was a university professor, a psychiatrist, a criminal justice expert, a schoolteacher (and several pupils), a company chief executive, and a comedian. And then of course, there were the politicians themselves, who not only asked searching questions about the evidence for mindfulness and how it might translate into the hard realities of public policy (“money is tight so everything has to be proven”) but also, significantly, spoke movingly about their own personal practice.

This degree of engagement (it is rare for such a turnout at these events, even rarer for so many Parliamentarians to stay till the end) shows the fruit of Chris Ruane’s cajoling of his colleagues to attend the mindfulness courses he set up in Westminster. The courses have been completed by 80 MPs and Lords, with more signed up for the next round.

Lord Andrew Stone spoke of how mindfulness had helped him face the stress of difficult negotiations during a recent trip to Egypt, while the Conservative MP Tracey Crouch shared how mindfulness has helped her emerge from a place of anxiety that led her to take antidepressants, and about which she’s only just felt able to go public. There was a sense of human connection, openness, even a (brave) vulnerability in the room which I’m told is not common at political gatherings, especially those which stretch across party divides.

Alongside these testimonies we heard about the broad challenges facing UK society: reduced spending on mental health care despite a rising tide of poor well-being (50 million of those antidepressant prescriptions each year—not far off one per person), restricted social mobility, the apparent conflict between attainment and well-being in schools, a pervading sense of pressure and lack of agency in workplaces, and the economic (not to mention human) cost of poor impulse control among offenders.

The politicians’ capacity to come from a place of practice is, I think, crucial. One of the risks of marking mindfulness as a political strategy is that it could be turned into yet another poorly-applied quick fix—throwing a watered-down, mindfulness training-lite at deeply embedded systemic problems is unlikely to have much impact. At best, it may offer some respite from the stress of living in those systems, at worst it could become a way of maintaining them, placing all responsibility for distress on the individual (“Can’t you just be more mindful?”) without recognising the familial, social, and environmental pressures that contribute to our mind states. Following the event, Baroness Ruth Lister, a long-time social campaigner, wrote about such concerns on the House of Lords blog.

I am optimistic. That so many UK politicians have begun the work of mindfulness training is the best foundation for this work. Once you have some experience of both the possibilities and difficulties of working with your own mind, there is more likelihood that you’ll understand the scale of the task in inviting a more mindful world, as well as how such a vast project can gradually be undertaken and begun, aspect by aspect, moment by moment.

If it touches the hearts of enough people, the personal transformation of consciousness—greater awareness and compassion—that so many people report coming with mindfulness training cannot but go hand-in-hand with a wider transformation in systems that are, after all, maintained by collections of people. The problems begin when we are seduced by the prevailing culture and try to separate, ignore, or rush either aspect of this work, either the individual or the collective. Then, as one MP suggested during Wednesday’s session, mindfulness could be warped into another manifestation of the problems we are hoping it could help address. Jon Kabat-Zinn has wisely talked about this being a 1000 year project. At least that long, I would say, even though significant changes, such as the acceptance of mindfulness in mainstream settings, are now happening very quickly.

Lobbying, policy formation and action are vital parts of this work, and fundraising has started to enable a Parliamentary Inquiry, leading to a report next year on how the UK can become a more mindful nation. But mindfulness means little if applied just as a buzzword—to make any real difference it must come from a place of embodiment in those who aspire to share it. So, in my opinion, the most important aspect of the entry of mindfulness into the political landscape and vocabulary is that Parliamentarians themselves have been willing to engage their minds and bodies in the practice, before engaging their mouths in recommending it for others.

Ed Halliwell is working with the Mindfulness Initiative, which is supporting the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Mindfulness to develop the work described in this blog. If you able to help fund this work, or are able to give time and skills to help co-ordinate it, please get in touch via the contact page on his website (www.edhalliwell.com). 

7 Questions About Mindfulness That Still Need An Answer

Ed Halliwell on the next frontiers in mindfulness. 

It’s been a year since I updated this blog—a combination of teaching, book-writing, and a baby have squeezed the time I’ve had available for other things. Now with a little more space, I wondered how to begin again, especially with so much note-worthy happening in the world of mindfulness in the last 12 months.

To set some intention, I wrote down a list of seven mindfulness-related questions that seem live and unresolved. Many of them are concerned with the continuing rapid expansion of interest in mindfulness, and the possible opportunities and challenges this presents. I plan to touch on each of them more fully in the coming weeks and months.

The list isn’t meant as definitive or exhaustive, and there may not (yet) be clear answers to any of the questions. I would very much welcome your additions, disagreements, or any other comments. I will do my best to reflect on and address them in future posts.

1. Mindfulness is being adopted by the mainstream very quickly. Does this help or hinder the movement?

The huge interest in mindfulness carries great potential, but urgency of pursuit caneasily leads to grasping for results, speediness, and surface-skimming. And these, of course, are the very stress-producing habits that mindfulness training is designed to address. I’ve noticed that some courses seem to be getting shorter, with less time, practice, and investment required. Is this doing participants, and mindfulness, a disservice, or can these skills really be mastered in a few weeks, days, hours or even minutes? I heard of one magazine editor recently declaring mindfulness to be ‘over’—they were already looking for the next big thing in well-being. If short attention spans and impulsivity are part of the problem, will over-simplification and impatience really be the answer?

2. How can deep, contemplative wisdom be preserved in non-religious mindfulness training?

Mindfulness is often talked of as the simple practice of ‘being in the moment.' Traditionally, meditative training is much more than this—it is embedded in ethics (how to live with wisdom and compassion), along with a pointing to the insubstantiality of our self-concepts, to which we painfully cling. These aspects are implicit (and sometimes explicit) in good mindfulness teaching, but the subtlety of their presentation means they can easily get left out, if not consciously curated. With so much science now happening in the fields of compassion, gratitude and appreciation, could these and other key evidence-based themes be integrated (or re-integrated) more explicitly into the mindfulness courses and cultures now being developed?

3. What happens when we move from the ‘I’ to the ‘We’ of mindfulness?

Until now, the modern mindfulness movement – both the science and the training - has focused on benefits to the individual. But what about the potential for changes to systems, institutions, and societies, which after all, have an impact on personal well-being (and vice versa)? If mindfulness is taught within a mindless culture, what gives? Can mindfulness start to infuse that culture with kindness, or will that culture bend mindfulness to its own ends, perhaps chipping away at its radicalism and presenting it as a palliative—a way of coping with systemic dysfunction rather than a means to change it? What might happen if the emphasis was more explicitly put on mindfulness as a social, or even political practice?

4. What are the key questions in mindfulness research?

It’s generally well-established that mindfulness courses are helpful for promoting well-being. The question to which researchers are increasingly turning towards is ‘how’? It’s been generally assumed that meditation practice is the key active ingredient in a course, but the science has been somewhat equivocal about this. Could it be that other factors are just as, if not more, important? A good mindfulness course generally provides a resonant, supportive group, and training in attitudes such as gentleness, compassion, steadfastness, appreciation, acceptance, and nurturing. How important are these to the health-producing changes that occur? What other aspects of traditional meditative training (such as ethics, exploration of self-nature, the making of commitments, the building of communities) might also be demonstrably beneficial? Are there more recent scientific discoveries (say, in the science of unconscious biases) where mindfulness training might have an impact? Early work is being carried out in these areas, and it will likely be fascinating to see the results.

5. What makes a good mindfulness teacher?

If you were looking to learn the piano, what would you look for in a teacher? Someone who loves music and can transmit their joy and passion? Someone who’s been playing themselves a long time and has a degree of proficiency? Someone who understands the pitfalls and difficulties and has the patience and skill to work with students? With no regulation of and huge demand for mindfulness courses, plus lots of enthusiasm among would-be teachers, how can we know if what’s being offered is helpful? Meditators in some traditions would be expected to train for decades before they began teaching others, and it’s often said that mindfulness is ‘caught’ as much as ‘taught,’ so will courses led by relatively inexperienced practitioners work as well? How can we help those looking for an authentic training to know what that might be, and to train those who want to deliver it?

6. What happens when a mindfulness course ends?

Many mindfulness courses are eight weeks long or less. Yet evidence and experience suggests that while remarkable changes can occur during such a short, intensive training, the possibility for deepening practice doesn’t end there—indeed, for most people, it’s only just beginning. And yet, while some teachers offer graduate courses and follow-up sessions, many people coming to the end of a mindfulness course report a sense of ‘falling off a cliff’—after a period of intensive support and learning, this ground suddenly falls away, as, frequently, does their practice, even though they are strongly motivated. In the rush to meet demand for ‘beginners’ courses, how can the yearning for connection be met, among those who’ve already started on this rewarding, challenging path?

7. Are there deeper reasons to practise than stress-reduction?

Reports in the media about the benefits of mindfulness can seem like a constant stream of good news – mental health, physical health, relationships, behavioural habits, competency, and creativity can all be improved, while stress relating to all sorts of circumstances can be reduced. This is excellent of course, but what about the aspects of being alive that are less easy to face up to? Does mindfulness have a role, for example, in working with the knowledge that we, and everyone we love, is going to die?

With all the focus on quick gains to health and happiness, there may be something deeper to these practices that our positive-results focused science and culture is missing. If so, could it be spoken of, perhaps not in the language of data, but with the language of the heart? ‘Turning towards difficulty’ is at the very core of a mindfulness course, but with our habits of avoidance, it’s also perhaps the aspect that gets talked of the least, at least in mainstream media reports. How can courage (and airspace) be found for the uncertainties, the anxieties, the suffering, the losses that can come into awareness when we pay attention, as well as the material benefits that we get so excited about? Indeed, could it be that the receiving of these benefits actually depend on our willingness to turn towards unpalatable truths? By neglecting them, might we receive a lesser version of the wellbeing we crave, and miss out on a deeper sense of meaning and value—one that can’t easily be summarized in a newspaper headline, or a scientific study abstract?

Dispatches: Mindfulness in Society Conference 2013

Ed Halliwell, Mindful's "Examined Life" blogger, explores key findings and discussions from the conference. 

A remarkable week for mindfulness in the UK. Five hundred delegates have been attending the fully-booked Mindfulness In Society conference, braving unseasonal snow to converge on the northern English city of Chester. Another packed gathering follows in London as Jon Kabat-Zinn, pioneer of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), addresses a Mindfulness in Schools conference and gives a talk for the influential Action For Happiness movement.

The demographics of this weekend’s conference were interesting. A fellow attendee told me on arrival there were ten women here for every man. Most were professionals working in the field (what’s the collective noun for mindfulness teachers? A presence? An inquiry? An invitation?) and there has been a strong sense of shared appreciation at feeling part of a growing community. Jon Kabat-Zinn once had a vision that skilled and committed meditators might make an ethical living sharing their practice for the benefit of others. Walking around the conference hotel, that vision came to life around him. Chester felt like an attentive, non-judgemental place to be the last few days.

Saturday was the start of the conference proper, and the wealth on offer—dozens of presentations on various aspects of meditation research—felt at times overwhelming. It was a challenge to stay centred in the heart with so much material that engaged the head. With the question ‘are mindfulness courses helpful?’ seemingly settled among scientists, the major focus of study seems now to be shifting to how they help—the so-called mechanisms of mindfulness.

Shauna Shapiro, associate professor of counselling psychology at Santa Clara University and one of several visitors from the US, gave a passionate keynote on the importance of intention and attitude (or, quoting Jack Kornfield, “setting the compass of your heart”). Emphasising that mindfulness is a way of shifting our relationship to experience—re-perceiving—Shapiro suggested this was an extension of developmental stages that human beings go through as children, but which continue further if we consciously practise. As youngsters we realise we are not fused with other people, and in meditation we see we are not fused with our thoughts. When this unfolds, the separate sense of self, which emerged as we grew up, falls away again, this time not into unconscious fusion but to ‘simply awareness happening’. As the sense of self drops away, so can the suffering that comes with it.

This was a theme warmed to by one of the day’s later speakers, John Teasdale, co-developer of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). Teasdale reflected on why zebras don’t get ulcers—unlike humans, they don’t abstract into past or future rumination, with all the stress that creates. But rather than romanticising the simple (and limited) life of a zebra, Teasdale explained that by holding our minds in kind awareness, we can move into what he called ‘post-conceptual knowing’—allowing the benefits of planning, reflecting, and learning, without the attendant distress. An enlightened zebra, perhaps?

With his complex models of modes of mind (not to mention the rest of a day jammed with ideas and data), Teasdale warned that our minds might get full, and so it was a delight to be released into a day of practice on Sunday, led by Kabat-Zinn. To the bemusement and amazement of hotel staff, their buzzing guests suddenly went silent and spent the day sitting quietly and attentively, with occasional breaks for walking and eating meditation in the foyers (cue even more bemusement and amazement). As our teacher joked from his meditation cushion at the centre of the stage: “It seems like something’s happening, and yet nothing’s happening.”

"If you're tweeting that you're meditating with Jon Kabat-Zinn, then you're not!" Kabat-Zinn warmly warned conference-goers.

Warm, funny, sharp, humble and wise, it’s difficult to convey the joy of spending a day practising with Kabat-Zinn, and he effortlessly riffed his way through zen koans, cutting-edge science, the perils of technology (“If you’re tweeting that you’re meditating with Jon Kabat-Zinn, then no, you’re not!”), stories from the early days of MBSR and the need for a new medical paradigm that nurtures what’s already right with people rather than just focusing on their ailments. Gently prodding his audience to greater insight through guided practice and keen dialogue, he reminded us it was time to live up to our species’ Latin name – homo sapiens sapiens (“Beings that know that they know”).

The day concluded with a celebratory dinner, prefaced by a stirring speech from UK Member of Parliament, Chris Ruane, who has recently tabled more than 400 mindfulness-related questions in the House of Commons. A confirmed advocate of mindfulness in politics, Ruane has rounded up an all-party group of MPs and Lords to take an eight-week mindfulness course, the final session of which Kabat-Zinn will be invited to address later this week.

Kabat-Zinn continued with a keynote yesterday morning, expanding on the need for a healthcare rather than a ‘disease-care’ system. He pointed out that meditation and medicine have the same derivation (meaning “right inward measure”), and that the Buddha’s four noble truths are actually a medical diagnosis (including favourable prognosis and treatment plan) that came from a physician who claimed to be not a God, but simply an awake person. He highlighted Norman Farb and colleagues’ 2007 study which showed that teaching people mindfulness enables them to shift their brain activity from the default, narrative network (active when we default to thinking in conceptual terms, often about ourselves) to an experiential network which comes on-line when everything—including us—is felt as more of an unfolding process. Concluding with a quote from Einstein (“The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self”), it felt that we had come full circle from Shauna Shapiro’s opening talk two days earlier.

The conference continues until Tuesday, with presentations and dialogue on topics such as Mindfulness in The Workplace and the ongoing integration of mindfulness-based approaches into the UK National Health Service (MBCT has been a government-body approved treatment here since 2004), before the focus shifts south to London. We were reminded several times over the weekend that mindfulness remains “just a pimple on the elephant” in terms of its global influence, but is nevertheless becoming “a liberative meme” with the potential to relieve all manner of suffering in a stricken world. Something mindful surely seems to be happening in the UK right now, even if, in words Kabat-Zinn borrowed from our own William Shakespeare, it looks like much ado about nothing.

Mindfulness: Not Just "Brain Training"

I love that mindfulness practice is being investigated by science, and fascinated that many of the shifts reported by meditators throughout the ages are being corroborated by scientific evidence. The benefits of this are great—objective evaluations of practice can be encouraging, especially to those who might not otherwise be attracted to a "spiritual" discipline such as meditation.

Still, I often wonder if something is lost if we rely too much on scientific method and language as our way of approaching this work. I’ve written before about howscientific findings can bring expectation of future results, and that this can sometimes sabotage our mindfulness, taking us further into the stress of unfulfilled desire and out of the present moment. But I suspect there may be another risk too—that of unconsciously narrowing our experience into a conceptual frame.

Mindfulness is often spoken of these days as "brain training," especially in business settings. I do it myself sometimes, as a way of making sense of neuroscientific findings that show activity and structure in the brain can shift as a result of practice. This is fine, but traditionally, meditation has been considered more of a heart training than a brain training—a way of helping us to open our hearts to ourselves, others and the world. Indeed, the Sanskrit word sometimes translated as mind (citta) also means heart, and so mindfulness, as Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests, might just as well be called heartfulness.

Because scientific research is a matter of third-person observation, a conscious distancing in order to observe, and also a matter of logical interpretation, which happens at the level of thought and analysis, something of this heart quality can be missed when science is our only mode of engaging with things. The brain is an important organ, of course, but it’s interesting how much weight and attention is given to neuroscientific research as compared to evidence about what’s going on in the body. Brain is king, it seems.

On mindfulness courses, people often experience a realization that our supposedly logical minds, represented by the brain, are not always that logical—our thoughts are riddled with biases and preconceptions. Our thoughts are not as powerful as we make them out to be, and trying to think our way out of stresses or emotional upheavals is not usually very effective. The work of mindfulness for many of us, then, is a letting go of attachment to what’s going on in our heads, and a reacquaintance with what’s happening in our bodies—a willingness to connect with the feeling and tone of experience. This reorientation process makes us feel more balanced and whole, and often, more friendly, compassionate, and open.

Of course, thought is not bad—sometimes we just need to relate to it a little differently, realizing that it is only a part of who we are, and that our ruminations don’t have to dominate. Instead, many of us have swallowed not only "I think, therefore I am," but "what I think is who I am." When we come to mindfulness practice, part of what we’re doing is letting go of some of these apparent certainties and coming into a more fluid, more uncertain, but also richer and more rewarding way of being. As we let go of fixating on thoughts, we can feel the textures of our lives more exquisitely—we can get in touch with the heart of things. This is mindfulness as art, and it has rather a different flavor—juicy, vibrant, bubbling—than mindfulness described as "brain training," which on its own can sound rather flat and dry.

Our challenge, perhaps, is reject neither science nor art but to integrate the richness of experience with the clarity of observation. Indeed, isn’t bringing these two modes together an important aspect of what mindfulness really is?