Chapter 3

Nurturing Your Motivation

In This Chapter

Setting your mindful intentions

Getting in the right frame of mind

Committing to the long haul

Making a commitment to mindfulness

One of the best ways of boosting your capacity to be mindful is to practise mindfulness meditation every day. Establishing a daily habit of mindfulness isn’t always easy, but it’s well worth the effort. With a clear and strong motivation to practise, you can develop the firm commitment necessary to engage in mindfulness regularly. Once the habit of daily mindfulness is created, the routine becomes as natural as having a shower – you now have a way of training and resting your mind every day, not just your body.

This chapter explores what your deep intentions of mindfulness are and it includes a range of exercises and how you can you use them to motivate your daily mindfulness practice.

Exploring Your Intentions

The word ‘intention’ comes from the Latin intendere, meaning to direct attention. Intention is purpose – what you hope to achieve from a certain action. If you’re driving to work and your intention is to get there on time no matter what happens, you may drive recklessly and dangerously. If you’re driving to work and your intention is to get there safely, you try to drive with a more focused attention, and at a safe and reasonable speed. Here’s a more startling example. Imagine someone cutting you with a knife – such as a surgeon who has to insert a blade and cut you open. Because the intention of the surgeon is to help restore your health, you’re probably willing to undergo this seemingly horrendous procedure. However, a murderer may also use a blade, but with a far less positive intention and you’re unlikely to be so willing!

Intention shapes the nature of the whole action itself. Although the action may be the same (as with the example of cutting someone open), the intention itself strongly influences your moment-by-moment experience and state of mind. For this reason, the right intention is vitally important in mindfulness meditation. I’d go so far as to say that the nature of the intention itself strongly influences the quality of your meditative practice.

Clarifying intention in mindfulness

Dr Shauna Shapiro of Santa Clara University, together with several colleagues, came up with a helpful model to suggest how mindfulness works. The researchers identified three key components: intention, attention and attitude. The components are required together and feed into each other when you engage in mindfulness. The components link in well with the often-used definition of mindfulness, which is: paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgementally. Breaking this down, you have:

• Paying attention – attention
• On purpose – intention
• In a particular way – attitude

These three components work together seamlessly to create the moment-to-moment experience that is mindfulness. Figure 3-1 shows the components of mindfulness working together.

Intention is a component that often gets lost when people consider mindfulness, and yet it’s vitally important. Intention sets the scene for what unfolds in the practice itself.

Intention evolves. One study has shown that people’s intention in mindfulness is usually stress reduction, and moves on to greater understanding of their thoughts and emotions, and finally towards greater compassion. For example, you may begin practising meditation to reduce your anxiety and when that subsides, you practise to attain greater control over your emotions and eventually to be a more compassionate and kind person to your family and friends. What’s your intention?

Mindfulness is being developed to relieve the suffering caused by a whole host of different conditions, from eating disorders to anxiety in pregnancy, from reducing students’ stress to speeding up the healing process for psoriasis. These are all a wonderful flowering of applications of mindfulness, but keep in mind the original purpose and vision of mindfulness as a way of relieving all suffering, both yours and others’, and developing a greater sense of compassion. Such a large and positive vision enlarges the practice of mindfulness for those who share those possibilities.

Finding what you’re looking for

The following exercise – what I call a ‘mindful visualisation’ – can give you great insight into your true and deep intentions in practising mindfulness. When I first used this exercise, I was surprised and fascinated by the insights into my own deep motives.

Afterwards, do the writing exercise described in the next section.

Discovering your intention: Mindful visualisation

This exercise is best done by listing to Track 3 from the audio. Find a comfortable position: seated in a chair or sofa, or lying down. Choose a position in which you feel cosy and comfortable. Close your eyes.

Imagine that you’re sitting by the side of a beautiful lake. The place can be somewhere you’ve been before or seen before, or may be completely created in your imagination – it doesn’t matter which. Find a place where you feel calm and relaxed. The lake may have majestic trees around one side and stunning mountains in the distance. The temperature is just about perfect for you, and a gentle breeze ensures that you feel refreshed. A flock of birds are flying across the horizon, and you can sense a freshness in the air. Your body feels relaxed and at ease.

You look down and notice a pebble. You pick it up and look at it. It has a question engraved on it. The question is: ‘What do I hope to get from mindfulness?’ You look carefully at the question as you hold the pebble gently in your hand.

You throw the pebble out into the lake. You watch the pebble as it soars through the air in an arc, almost in slow motion, and eventually makes contact with the surface of the water. You see the circular ripples radiate out. As the pebble contacts with the water, you continue to reflect on the question: ‘What do I hope to get from mindfulness?’

The pebble moves down into the water. You’re able to see the pebble as it sinks deeper and deeper into the water. As it continues to smoothly fall downwards in the deep water, you continue to watch it, and you continue to reflect on the question: ‘What do I hope to get from mindfulness?’ You keep watching as the pebble falls, and you keep reflecting on the question.

Eventually, the pebble softly makes contact with the bottom and settles there. The question ‘What do I hope to get from mindfulness?’ is still visible. Reflect on that question for a few more moments.

Bring the exercise to a close, noticing the physical sensations of your body, taking a slightly deeper breath and, when you’re ready, slowly opening your eyes. If you keep a journal, record what you discovered in it. This may help to reveal further insights as you write.

No right or wrong answers exist for this ‘intention’ meditation. Some people get clear answers about what they hope to get out of practising mindfulness, and others reflect on the question, yet no answers arise. Some people find that the answers they get at the surface of the lake are the more obvious ones but, as the pebble falls deeper, their reasons to practise clarify and deepen too. If the meditation was helpful, great; if not, don’t be concerned – there are other exercises to do later in this chapter.

Discovering your intention: Sentence completion

Take a piece of paper or your journal, and write as many answers as you can to the following questions in one minute, without thinking about them too much:

• I want to practise mindfulness because …
• I’m hoping mindfulness will give me …
• If I’m more mindful I’ll …
• The real reasons I want to practise mindfulness are to …
• Ultimately mindfulness will give me …
• Mindfulness is …

These sentence-completion exercises may help to clarify your motivation and intentions for mindfulness.

Now read and reflect on your answers. Did any of your answers surprise you? Why is that? You may like to come back to these answers when you’re struggling to motivate yourself to meditate; reading your answers then can be a way of empowering yourself to practise some meditation.

Developing a vision

A vision is a long-term aspiration: something you’re willing to work towards. By having a clear vision, you have an idea of where you need to get to. Think of it in terms of any journey you make, for which you need to know two things: where you are now, and where you need to get to.

Mindfulness is about being in the present moment and letting go of goals. Why think about visions and intentions? Why not just be in the here and now and forget about aspirations? Well, the vision gives you the energy, the motivation and the strength to practise mindfulness, especially when you really don’t feel like practising.

For example, your mind may be jam-packed with thoughts, ideas and opinions to such an extent that you can’t easily calm down. Your vision may be to be a calm and collected person, someone who never really worries about things too much, and who others come to for advice. With this in mind, you know why you’re practising mindfulness and are committed to sticking at it. This doesn’t mean that the goal of each and every mindful meditation is calmness, and that if you’re not calm you’ve failed; a vision is bigger than that – a long-term objective rather than a short-term goal.

If you’re not too sure what your vision is, come back to this section after doing some mindfulness exercises or after dipping into other areas of this book. Doing this may give you a clearer idea of a vision to work towards. The practice of mindfulness itself helps to develop an unambiguous vision as you begin to experience some benefits.

Try the following two exercises to help clarify your vision.

Writing a letter to your future self

This is a wonderful way to develop a long-term vision of what you hope to achieve through mindfulness.

Reflect on your future self in five or ten years. This is your chance to let go and dream. How will you feel? What sort of person do you hope to be? How do you cope with challenges in your life?

Write a letter to yourself about it, or if you’re a visual person, draw pictures. This vision gives your brain something to work towards, and the opportunity to begin discovering a path for you to tread to get there.

Pin the letter up on the wall at home, or ask a good friend to post the letter back to you any time in the next year. Most people feel great receiving a letter from themselves dropping through the post, and the self-reflection always seems to arrive at the right time in your life.

You can even send an email to yourself from your future self. The website www.futureme.org allows you to do this for free.

Attending your own funeral

Try to overcome any reluctance about this exercise, because it’s very moving and powerful. Imagine being at your own funeral service. You’re aware of family and friends around you. Consider each person and imagine everyone saying what you’d like them to say about you. Really hear the positive things they’re saying about you and your life. What do they value about you? What sort of aspects of your personality would you like them to talk about? What have they admired about you? After the exercise, think about it. How did you feel? What did people say about you?

The exercise helps to put things into context and clarifies your values – what’s really important to you. How can you use what was said to create a vision of the kind of person you want to become? How can that vision help motivate your mindfulness practice?

Ask yourself the following question every day for a couple of weeks: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m about to do today?’ Whenever the answer is no for too many days in a row, you know that you need to change something. Even if you don’t explicitly ask this question, you get a flavour of the value of considering death in order to help you wake up and focus on what’s most important in life.

Practising mindfulness for everyone’s benefit

If you’re clear about the personal benefits of mindfulness, and practise mindfulness for your own benefit, that’s great. However, you can also experiment with practising mindfulness for others. Shifting your intention can make the experience more enjoyable. Just like if you do some volunteer work, you’re doing the work to help others, so you can practise mindfulness meditation in a way that’s of service to others.

How does mindfulness benefit others? Well, the more you practise mindfulness, the more likely you are to be kind, attentive and helpful to others. You’ll probably be less snappy and irritable. You’ll be in control of your temper and have the energy and willingness to help others with their difficulties. All these qualities are not just great for you – they’re great for anyone you come into contact with.

Here are a few people you can think of who may benefit from your mindfulness practice:

• Your partner or close family
• Your friends
• Your colleagues at work
• The village, town or city where you live

Pick one group that resonates with you. See if you can practise your mindfulness from the perspective of helping that particular group of people through your increased mindful awareness and friendly demeanour.

This approach works for all activities. For example, when I remember that I’m writing this book for your benefit, I feel far more motivated. I want to write it as best I can to help you to be healthier, happier and more peaceful. It feels great! If I was writing and just thinking about how it may make me more popular or wealthy, the action becomes far less joyous.

Preparing Yourself for Mindfulness

Having a positive attitude towards mindfulness is helpful. You’re probably new to mindfulness, therefore you don’t know whether it’ll work for you. But being open to the possibility that you’ll find value in mindfulness helps, just like when learning any new skill like golf, French or flower arranging!

If you go into mindfulness thinking ‘This probably isn’t going to help me,’ as you practise and meet obstacles, you may just give up.

As Henry Ford said:

‘Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.’

So think you can! It’s worth listening to Henry Ford: he revolutionised the car industry. You may not agree with Ford’s invention, but he achieved what many thought was impossible. Mindfulness can be just as revolutionary in your own life, if you have the right attitude. By having a positive attitude, you’re giving yourself permission to find more peace and joy in your life.

When you cultivate a long-term vision for why you want to practise mindfulness, let it be just that: long term. Let go in the here and now as you engage in the practice. Don’t worry too much about whether you’re moving towards your goal. Trust that the process of mindfulness meditation, practised by millions of people and supported scientifically by thousands of research papers, will take care of itself if you give it time, and stop questioning its value as far as you can.

Looking Beyond Problem-Solving

Mindfulness isn’t a quick fix. You need to practise mindfulness on the good days and the bad ones – on days when you feel things are going okay, as well as when you feel anxious, stressed or depressed. Mindfulness is best cultivated slowly and steadily, day by day, so that when things become difficult or challenging for you, you can remember and use mindful awareness to bring your attention to your breathing and soothe your mind.

Think of regular mindfulness meditation like putting on a safety belt in a car. You put the belt on every time you travel just in case you’re in an accident. You don’t put the belt on just before you crash – you’d be too late. The car journey is the same, whether you have a belt on or not, but the main difference is the preparation for what may happen. The safety belt of mindfulness helps to slow things down, so you can enjoy the view and come to a safe stop when things become challenging.

There will always be days when you forget to practise mindfulness, or just can’t find the motivation to do so. When this happens, your job is to be tremendously forgiving. Be really nice to yourself. Just like when children get a low grade in a subject – there’s no point shouting at them. Instead, you encourage them. Pick them up. Tell them to try again, step by step, nice and slowly. Give yourself the same gentle encouragement when you struggle to be mindful – that’s the only way to get back into the practice.

Honing Your Commitment

Commitment is a pledge you make for a course of action. In this case your commitment is to mindfulness, developed through meditation and practised every day. Once you’ve decided to practise meditation, to commit is to follow through with your beliefs consistently. Commitment is also persistence with purpose. To achieve anything of significance, you need certain key commitments to stick to. Without commitment you can be easily swayed by passing feelings, and before long you forget the practices that you thought about doing, or they become too far out of reach for you to resume them in your life.

How do you make a commitment? The truth of the matter is that commitment is hard work. Just look at the number of people who struggle to stick to their New Year resolutions. However, the very fact that you make a commitment is the first step. Just because you failed to achieve your commitment doesn’t mean you should give up altogether. Say you want to stop eating chocolate. The first few days are fine, but then after a week you see a delicious bar of your favourite chocolate lying on the kitchen table to tempt you, and without thinking you begin devouring it. As you put the wrapper in the bin, you think that you’ve ‘failed’ and you may give up on the resolution altogether. Instead, realise that during the first seven days since your resolution not to eat chocolate, you haven’t eaten chocolate for six days. That’s pretty good going: six out of seven, or a 86% success rate! Try again tomorrow.

Commitment is most challenging when times are hard. When you’ve had a tough day, when everything seems to be going wrong, when the last thing you want to do is sit down and meditate, ironically that’s when you need commitment most. Challenging days test your commitment to your original decision to practise every day. However, if you don’t practise, even though you had every desire and squeezed every ounce of your commitment to practise but just didn’t manage it, bring an attitude of curiosity and acceptance to the situation rather than beating yourself up. What’s done is done. You wanted to practise but you didn’t. The question is: ‘What happened?’ What thoughts and feelings led to your inaction? What’s going through your mind right now as you ask yourself these questions?

Mastering self-discipline

The word ‘discipline’ has negative connotations for some people, and can be a bit of a turn-off, which is a shame because self-discipline is important for a healthy lifestyle. Self-discipline is the ability to get yourself to do a certain action despite your emotional state at the time.

Imagine what you can achieve with perfect levels of self-discipline. No matter what you choose to do, you’ll be able to do it. Say you want to become fitter. You just make that decision and you’re guaranteed to follow through with the necessary regular exercise to ensure that your desired outcome happens. This little example goes to show how amazingly powerful self-discipline can be and why it’s worth cultivating.

However, on its own, discipline can create a sense of cold, clinical action, almost too devoid of emotion. By combining this sense of discipline with your intentions and helpful attitudes (covered in Chapter 4), you can create a useful source of inspiration for your mindfulness practice.

Here are some tips for boosting your self-discipline for daily mindfulness meditation:

• Forgive yourself for the odd slip. Remember, meditation is a long-term process. Don’t just give up because of a lapse. If at first you don’t succeed, find out why and try again!
• Take things step by step. Research has found that willpower is like a muscle. Willpower can become fatigued if you use it too much in a day, but can be strengthened over time. So don’t try to transform your whole life in a day. You may want to start with a very short daily mindfulness practice.
• Believe in yourself. You can do it. Even if you suffer from attention disorders or you’re ill, you can practise mindfulness, so believe that you’re capable of making a commitment. Any tiny step is valid.
• Ask for support. Perhaps you can practise meditation with a partner or friend. Joining a meditation group can be a valuable support too.
• Reward yourself. You’ve probably given yourself a hard time on many an occasion for not doing something right, or well, or not being good enough, so why not reward yourself for doing something you’re proud of? Creating a daily discipline of meditation is hard, so if you do manage for a week or even a few days, treat yourself to a little something!

Making a commitment that’s right for you

One of the reasons people find it hard to stick to a commitment is because they’re too ambitious. If you’ve never gone jogging before and you suddenly decide to run the marathon tomorrow, one of two things happens: you give up or you finish in a very injured and unhappy state. The knock-on effect is that you hate running or think that you’re useless at it.

If you decide you’re going to meditate for two hours a day for the rest of your life, no matter what happens, that may be tough. You need to take things easy and begin slowly. How do you decide the right commitment for you? Well, it depends what you want to get out of meditation. You can start with an eight-week commitment of practising mindfulness meditation for 30 minutes per day, and see how that goes. (See Chapter 9 for more about the eight-week routine.)

Maybe ten minutes a day is more appropriate for your lifestyle, or even regular three-minute meditations throughout the day. Perhaps you suffer from chronic pain or depression or want to develop yourself to a high level and wish to make a bigger commitment. That’s fine, of course, but start fairly modestly and build up your practising time. Meditation has no ideal minimum or maximum time for which to practise it. And ultimately, your whole life can be a meditation. Any time you do whatever you’re doing consciously, with a non-judgemental attention, you’re being mindful.

If you think that life is going well for you, and you just get slightly stressed from time to time and want something to relax and focus you a bit more, then perhaps ten minutes of formal mindfulness meditation practice may be fine for you. If you suffer from medium to high levels of stress, anxiety, depression, or ill health, turn to Chapters 12–14 for advice on the right commitment for you.

Once the regular discipline of meditation becomes a habit, the effort of practice becomes less. Cast your mind back to when you first learnt to brush your teeth. It was probably a real chore. Yes, it’s good for your teeth, but you weren’t interested – you wanted to play a game or watch TV, not waste your time brushing your teeth. But now, if you don’t brush your teeth for any reason, it just doesn’t feel right. As you regularly practise meditation, you eventually find the same: you become nourished by the practice itself, and what may at times have felt difficult to do now feels strange not to do. This is the sign that you’ve created a wonderful, positive way to uplift your health and wellbeing. Of course, at times you’ll feel reluctant to practise, such as when you’re reluctant to brush your teeth if you’re really tired, but on the whole you’re now a keen mindfulness meditator.

Your informal practice, which involves being mindfully aware of your day-to-day activities (see Chapter 8), will happen almost naturally if you regularly practise meditation for a set amount of time every day.

Inspiring yourself with extra motivation

Still struggling with the idea of self-discipline? Here are a final few thoughts to help you.

Think of your mind as being like a puppy. When you train a puppy, you need to be kind and gentle at first. If you put a leash on it and drag it hard from one place to another, the puppy won’t learn. You’ll probably upset it and will never train it well. However, if you let it do whatever it wants, you’re also in trouble! The dog will be the master, and will rule the house. The young puppy learns that whatever it feels like doing at the time, it can do, making you feel very tired and frustrated with cleaning up and meeting its never-ending needs and desires. The puppy may end up eating too much and become sick. The middle way is best. You need to guide the puppy to particular actions, and whenever it does them, you reward it. If the puppy does the wrong thing, you don’t give it much attention, and eventually it stops.

Train your own mind in the same way. When your mind comes up with all sorts of ideas about what you could be doing instead of meditating, just kindly ignore it, without fighting or blocking the thoughts. Give your attention to the inner commitment to meditate, and reward that aspect of mind by meditating. Before long, your puppy mind will be a well-trained and beautiful dog, behaving itself most of the time. You need lots of patience and progress may be slow, but the rewards make the puppy-training programme well worth it!

Each time you practise mindfulness, you increase the chance of meditating again on another day. This is because any new activity you take on, whether physical or mental, creates a new pathway in the brain. It’s a bit like creating a new pathway through a forest. At first, walking through all the overgrowth is difficult. You need to push the overhanging branches out of the way and tread on the long grass under your feet. However, if you keep walking on that path, it becomes easier and easier. Soon enough, you don’t need to battle any more or think about which way to go next. The path is clear. It’s the same with pathways in the brain. In fact, that’s what commitment to an action creates in the brain – a pathway to greater mindfulness, awareness and ‘aliveness’.

Dealing with resistance to practice

People often ask me, both in person and on social media, how to overcome the resistance to practising mindfulness. They know it’s good for them, but for some reason they just can’t make themselves sit down and meditate. I think it’s a common experience for many people.

Here are some tips I suggest:

• Make peace with the resistance. If you really don’t feel like meditating, that’s okay. You don’t need to set up a battle within yourself! Instead, take a break. Let go of the inner fight to practise. Come back to it when you’re ready to do so.
• Feel the resistance. Notice when you feel the resistance in your body. Is the feeling in the pit of your stomach, your chest or somewhere else? Feel the sensation together with your breathing. Now you’re already practising some mindfulness without knowing it – sneaky, but cool!
• Boost your informal mindfulness practice. This means just being more conscious of whatever your daily activities are. If you need to walk to the bus stop, really feel the sensations in your feet and the breeze against your skin. If you’re drying clothes on the washing line, make an extra effort to notice the fresh scent of the clothes and the stretch in your body as you peg the clothes up. Give your mind a break from your usual recurring thoughts.