Chapter 2

Enjoying the Benefits of Mindfulness

In This Chapter

Understanding what mindfulness is for

Discovering the effects of mindfulness on your thoughts and emotions

Exploring the heart of mindfulness

The enjoyment that comes from mindfulness is a bit like the enjoyment that comes from dancing. Do you dance because of the cardiovascular benefits or for boosting your brain by following a tricky dance routine? When you dance with a goal or motive in mind, it kind of spoils it a bit, doesn’t it? Dancing for the sake of dancing is far more fun. But of course, dancing for the sheer pleasure of it doesn’t reduce the benefits on your mind and body of dancing – they’re just the icing on the cake.

In the same way, be mindful for the sake of being mindful. Mindfulness is about connecting with your senses, being curious, exploring the inner workings of the human mind. If you’re too concerned about reaping the benefits of mindfulness, you spoil the fun of it. The journey of mindfulness isn’t to reach a certain destination: the journey is the destination. Keep this in mind as you read about the various benefits of mindfulness described in this chapter, and let the dance of mindfulness unfold within you. The benefits of mindfulness – relaxation, better mental and emotional health, and an improved relationship with yourself and others – are just the added bonuses along the way. Read on to discover how mindfulness can help you.

Relaxing the Body

The body and mind are almost one entity. If your mind is tense with anxious thoughts, your body automatically tenses as well. They go together, hand in hand.

Why does your body become tense when you experience high levels of stress? The reason is mechanical and wired in the human body. When you experience stress, a chain reaction starts in your body, and your whole being prepares to fight or flee the situation. So a lot of energy surges through your body; because your body doesn’t know what to do with this energy, you tense up.

The aim of mindfulness isn’t to simply make you more relaxed. Mindfulness goes far deeper than that. Mindfulness – a mindful awareness – is about becoming aware and exploring your moment-by-moment experience, in a joyful way if at all possible.

So if you’re tense, mindfulness means becoming aware of that tension. Which part of your body feels tense? What shape, colour and texture is that tension? What’s your reaction to the tension; what are your thoughts? Mindfulness is about bringing curiosity to your experience. Then you can begin breathing into the tense part of your body, bringing kindness and acknowledging your experience – again, not trying to change or get rid of the tension. And that’s it. Rest assured, doing this often leads to relaxation. See Chapter 12 for more on stress reduction.

Getting back in touch

As a baby, you were probably very much in touch with your body. You noticed subtle sensations, and may have enjoyed feeling different textures in the world around you. As you grew up, you learnt to use your head more and your body less. You probably aren’t as in touch with your body as you were as a young child. You may not notice subtle messages that the body gives you through the mind. I’m sure that some people see the body as simply a vehicle for carrying the brain from one meeting to another!

In fact, the messages between your mind and body are a two-way process. Your mind gives signals to your body, and your body gives signals to your mind. You think, ‘I fancy reading that mindfulness book,’ and your body picks it up. You feel hungry, and your body signals to your mind that it’s time to eat. What about the feeling of stress? If you notice the tension in your shoulders, the twitch in your eye, or the rapid beating of your heart, again your body is sending signals to your mind.

What if your mind is so busy with its own thoughts that it doesn’t even notice the signals from your body? When this happens, you’re no longer in touch with or looking after your body. Hunger and thirst, tiredness and stress – you’re no longer hearing clearly your instinctual messages. This leads to a further disconnection between bodily signals and your mind, so things can get worse. Stress can spiral out of control though this lack of awareness.

Mindfulness emphasises awareness of your body. An important mindfulness meditation is the body scan (described in full in Chapter 6). In this meditation, you spend 10–30 minutes simply being guided to pay attention to different parts of your body, from the tips of your toes to the top of your head. Some people’s reaction is, ‘Wow, I’ve never paid so much attention to my body; that was interesting!’ or ‘I now feel I’m moving back into my body.’

The body scan meditation can offer a healing experience. Emotions you experienced in the past but weren’t ready to feel, perhaps because you were too young, can be suppressed and trapped in the body. Sometimes, people suffer for years from a particular physical ailment, but doctors are unable to explain the cause of it. Then, through counselling or meditation, the suppressed emotion arises into consciousness, which releases the emotion. The tightness in the body or the unexplained ‘dis-ease’ sometimes disappear with the release of the emotion. This is another example of how interconnected mind and body really are, and of the benefits of getting back in touch with the body. Chapter 14 has more on healing the body through mindfulness.

Boosting your immune system

If something’s wrong with your body, normally your immune system fights it. Unfortunately, one aspect of the stress response is your immune system not working as hard. When threatened, your body puts all its resources into surviving that threat; energy required for digestion or immunity is turned off temporarily.

Stress isn’t necessarily bad for you. If your stress levels are too low, you’re unable to perform effectively and get bored easily. However, if you’re stressed for sustained periods of time at high levels, your body’s natural immune system is going to stop working properly.

The latest research has found that if you have a positive attitude towards stress, seeing stress as energising and uplifting, the stress seems to have little negative effect on your body. So even your attitude towards stress has an effect.

Mindfulness enables you to notice subtle changes in your body. At the first sign of excessive stress, you can bring a mindful awareness to the situation and discover how to dissipate the stress rather than exacerbate it. By being mindful, you can also remember to see the positive, energising benefits of stress rather than just its negatives. In this way, mindfulness can really benefit your immune system.

Reducing pain

Amazingly, mindfulness has been proven to actually reduce the level of pain experienced by people practising it over a period of eight weeks. I’ve had clients who couldn’t find anything to help them manage and cope with their pain until they began using mindfulness meditation.

When you experience pain, you quite naturally want to block that pain out. You tighten your muscles around the region and make an effort to distract yourself. Another approach is that you want the pain to stop, so you react towards the pain in an angry way. This creates greater tension, not only in the painful region but in other areas of the body. Sometimes you may feel like fighting the pain. This creates a duality between you and your pain, and you burn energy to battle with it. Or perhaps you react with resignation: the pain has got the better of you and you feel helpless.

Mindfulness takes a radically different approach. In mindfulness, you’re encouraged to pay attention to the sensation of pain, as far as you can. So, if your knee is hurting, rather than distracting yourself or reacting in any other way, you actually focus on the area of physical pain with a mindful awareness. This means you bring attitudes like kindness, curiosity and acknowledgment towards the area of pain, as best you can. This isn’t easy at first, but you can get better with practice. You can then consider the difference between the sensation of the physical pain itself and all the other stuff you bring to the pain. You begin to understand the difference between physical pain and psychological pain. The physical pain is the actual raw sensation of pain in the body, whereas the psychological pain is the stress, anxiety, and frustration generated. Through mindfulness, you begin to let go of psychological pain so that only the physical pain is left. When the psychological pain begins to dissolve, the muscle tension around the physical pain begins to loosen, further reducing the perception of pain. You begin to be able to accept the pain as it is in this present moment. Read Chapter 14 for more about mindfulness and physical healing.

Slowing down the ageing process

Have you ever wondered why people die of old age? What exactly is the ageing process? Scientists have discovered that ageing occurs quite naturally in your cells. The scientists (Elizabeth Blackburn and colleagues) who discovered this won the Nobel Prize in medicine back in 2009 for this finding.

All your cells contain DNA – the information needed to reproduce each cell. These bundles of DNA are protected with small caps called telomeres, which are like the protective ends of shoelaces. The caps prevent the chains of DNA from fraying.

The older you get, the more these caps shorten. Eventually they disappear completely and your cells are unable to reproduce. That’s called dying of old age.

This wearing out of the caps at the ends of DNA bundles is associated with many diseases of old age like cancer, heart disease, diabetes and arthritis. Previously, scientists thought that this shortening of telomeres was inevitable.

The good news, however, is that the lower your level of stress, the slower these telomeres wear out. Research on groups that practice mindfulness meditation has shown that telomeres can actually be lengthened. This is an incredible finding. A mental discipline of mindfulness affected the microscopic genes in the bodies of those in the study and effectively reduced the rate of ageing. Those mindful meditators who felt the most positive benefit were the ones with the most improved telomere lengths.

So, no more need for Botox, anti-ageing cream or plastic surgery. Just practise mindfulness – it’s cheaper and you’ll probably look more beautiful and live to a ripe old age!

Calming the Mind

Your mind is like the ocean: occasionally wild, and at other times calm. Sometimes your mind goes from thought to thought without stopping to rest. At other times, your thoughts come more slowly and have more space between them.

Mindfulness isn’t so much about changing the rate of your thoughts, but about noticing the thoughts arising in the first place. By taking a step back from thoughts, you can hover above the waves. The waves are still there, but you have more possibility of watching the show rather than being controlled by the thoughts themselves.

Think of your mind like a good friend. If you invited your friend to your home, how do you treat her? Should you force her to drink coffee, eat three chocolate biscuits, and listen to you talk about your day even if she doesn’t want to? She may prefer tea and plain biscuits, and want to talk about her day too. You ask her what she’d like, in a kind and friendly manner. In the same way, treat your mind like a friend. Invite your mind to pay attention to your breath or the work you’re doing. When you notice that your mind is restless, acknowledge this. Smile and gently ask your mind to re-focus. The gentle approach is the only way. Then your mind will naturally clear in its own time.

Listening to your thoughts

Everything man-made around you was originally a thought in someone’s head. Many people consider thought to be all-powerful. All your words, all your actions and activities – everything is motivated by thought. So, being aware of the kind of thoughts going through your mind makes sense.

Have you ever noticed how you have the same sort of thoughts going around and around in your head? The brain easily gets into habitual patterns as your thoughts travel their paths within your brain. Neurons that fire together, wire together. Each time you have a particular thought or carry out a particular action, you slightly increase the chance of having the same thought again. Through repeated thinking or action, the connection between neurons strengthens. If you aren’t mindful of these thoughts or actions, you may have all sorts of negative, untrue, unhelpful thoughts or behaviours that influence your life without you even being aware of them or questioning the truth or validity of them.

For example, let’s say a client gives you negative feedback for some work you did. The thought ‘I’m not good enough for this job’ or ‘That person is so stupid’ may keep going around and around your head. You feel rough, your sleep is impacted and you can’t properly focus on today’s tasks. That’s not a great help. But fret not: mindfulness to the rescue!

Mindfulness encourages you to watch your thoughts, emotions, and actions; then you’re better able to notice unhelpful thoughts and question their truth. Additionally, just being mindful of thoughts and emotions with a sense of warmth seems to naturally dissipate them. They become far less of a problem. Turn to Chapter 6 for a sitting meditation that includes mindfulness of thoughts and emotions.

Making better decisions

Every moment of every day you make decisions, whether you’re aware of them or not. You made a decision to read this chapter. At some point, you’ll decide to stop and do something else. Even if you decide to make no decisions, that’s a decision too! More significant decisions you have to make have a bigger impact, and a ‘good’ decision is highly desirable. All you do and have at the moment is mostly due to the decisions you made in the past.

Awareness of your body can help you make better decisions: a gut feeling is a signal from your belly telling you what to do, and has been found in some experiments to be faster and more accurate than logical thinking. Research shows a mass of nerves in the gut that’s like a second brain. This intuition is routinely used by top CEOs of corporations to make critical decisions.

Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, says he makes most of his decisions based on gut instinct. If he relied on pure logical thinking and advice from accountants, he wouldn’t have started Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Galactic or many of his other ventures. Relying on his feelings, and not just pure reason, has made him both a multi-billionaire and great philanthropist.

Why is gut feeling so effective? Your unconscious mind has far more information than your conscious mind can handle. Making decisions just based on conscious logical thought misses out on the huge capacity of the subconscious brain. Mindfulness helps to deepen your level of awareness, and helps you to begin to tap into your intuitive, subconscious side.

Coming to your senses

One of the key ways of becoming more mindful and of calming the mind is to connect with your senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Consider the expressions, ‘That was sensible,’ ‘I sense something’s wrong,’ and ‘She’s come to her senses.’ People’s use of the word ‘sense’ shows we appreciate and value being in touch with our organs of perception. You know innately the value of connecting to your senses if you want to make a sensible decision.

What’s the benefit of purposefully connecting with your senses? Well, if you aren’t paying attention to the stimulation coming through your five senses, you’re only paying attention to your thoughts and emotions. You’re not aware of anything else. Your thoughts are mainly based on your experiences from the past – from memory. You may imagine something new, but on the whole your mind reworks past experiences or projects ideas into the future based on your past experiences. Emotions are also influenced by your thoughts. So, without paying attention to your senses, you’re stuck with your own thoughts and emotions based on the past instead of the present.

By purposefully connecting with one of your senses – say, touch – you begin naturally to calm your mind a little. In mindfulness you can begin by focusing on your breathing. Focus on your belly stretching or your chest expanding, or perhaps the movement of the air as it enters and leaves your body. By focusing on a particular sense, in this case the sense of touch, you’re focusing your attention. Rather than your mind wandering wherever it pleases, you’re gently training it to stay on one object, namely your breathing. And in the same way as you train a puppy to walk along a path and not keep running off, each time your attention strays, you bring it back, just as you would gently pull the puppy back to the path. You’re discovering how to be gentle with yourself, as well as finding out how to focus your attention. See Chapter 6 for a short mindful breathing meditation.

By coming to your senses mindfully, you are:

• Training your attention to focus
• Being kind to yourself when your mind wanders off
• Realising that you have a certain amount of choice about what you pay attention to
• Understanding that you can deliberately choose to shift attention away from thinking and into the senses
• Calming your mind and developing a sense of clarity

Creating an attentive mind

Attention is essential in achieving anything. If you can’t pay attention, you can’t get the job done, whatever the job is. Mindfulness trains your attention by sustaining your attention on one thing, or by switching the type of attention from time to time.

Daniel Goleman, author of the book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, recently published a book called Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. He explains just how important focus is in every domain of our lives. He also identified a research study that imaged the brains of people practising mindfulness of breath (try it yourself in Chapter 6). Researchers found four different stages while the brain went through the following mental workout:

1. Focus on your breathing. The part of the brain that deals with focus is activated.
2. Notice that your brain is on a train of thought. The part of the brain that notices that your attention has drifted off into a train of thought is activated.
3. Let go of that train of thought. The part of the brain that enables you to let go of your thoughts is activated.
4. Refocus on your breathing. The part of the brain used to re-focus on the object you wish to focus on is re-activated.

The parts of the brain dedicated to each of these processes were strengthened through repeated mindfulness practice.

If you do this exercise regularly, you’ll become more adept at focusing on whatever you need to pay attention to – whether it’s writing an email, listening to a loved one or watching a sunset.

Your attention can be focused in different ways (shown in Figure 2-1):

• Narrow attention is focused and sharp, like the beam of a laser. You may use this type of attention when chopping vegetables or writing a letter.
• Wide attention is more open and spacious, like a floodlight. When you’re driving, ideally your attention is open so you notice if a car moves closer to you from the side, or if children are playing farther ahead.
• Outer attention is attention to the outer world through your senses.
• Inner attention is an awareness of your thoughts and feelings.
• Observer or witness awareness is your capacity to know what type of attention you’re using. For example, if you’re drawing a picture, you’re aware that your attention is narrow. If you’re walking through the countryside, you’re aware that your attention is wide. For more on witness awareness, see the section ‘Becoming Aware: Discovering Yourself’ below.

All the different mindfulness meditations you read about in this book train your mind to be able to sustain attention in the various different ways mentioned in the preceding list.

Soothing Your Emotions

Emotions are tremendously influential on your behaviour and thoughts. If you’re feeling low, you’re probably far more reluctant to go out with friends, or laugh at a joke, or work with zest. If you’re feeling great, you’re on top of things; everything feels easy, and life flows easily.

How do you deal with emotions? Are you swept up by them, and do you just hope for the best? Mindfulness offers the opportunity to soothe yourself and step back from emotional ups and downs.

Understanding your emotions

What’s an emotion, a feeling, or mood?

You experience emotion partly from a survival point of view. If you don’t feel scared when faced with a raging bull, you’ll find yourself in lots of trouble. Other emotions, like happiness, help to create social ties with those around you, increasing your security. Even depression is thought to have evolved for your protection, reducing motivation and therefore the chance of experiencing harm or wasting energy through pursuing an unattainable goal.

Emotion comes from a Latin word meaning ‘to move out’. If you observe emotions, you can discover certain important characteristics:

• Emotions are always changing. You aren’t stuck with one emotion all your life, at the same intensity.
• Emotions are a very physical experience. If you’re feeling anxious, you may feel a tingling in your stomach. If you’re feeling angry, you may feel your breathing and heart rate go up.
• You can observe your own emotions. You can sense the difference between yourself and your emotions. You’re not your emotions, you’re the observer of your emotions.
• Emotions make a huge impact on your thoughts. When you’re feeling down, you’re likely to predict negative things about yourself or other people. When you’re feeling happy, you’re more likely to think positive thoughts, predict positive outcomes, and look upon the past in a positive light too.
• You tend to perceive emotions as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.

Managing feelings differently

Take a few minutes to consider the following emotions and how you deal with them:

• Anger
• Anxiety
• Fear
• Depression

Your approach may be to either avoid the emotion and pretend it isn’t there, or to express your feelings to whoever is nearby. Mindfulness offers an alternative – a way of meeting emotions that enables you to see them in a different light. The idea is to acknowledge and give mindful attention to difficult feelings, rather than avoid or react to them. Surprisingly, this tends to dissipate the strength and the pain of the emotion. See Chapters 12 and 13 for ways of dealing with a variety of different emotions.

My first experience of mindfulness was exciting, because my emotional state was quickly changed to a sense of calmness and joy. In fact, I didn’t even know I was previously stressed! The feeling of stress was just my normal state of mind. I was amazed that such a short mindfulness exercise could have such a powerful effect. I immediately had a desire to share this new-found technique with others.

Knowing Thyself: Discovering Your Observer Self

Before examining my sense of self and relationship with the world, I used to believe that I was a tiny, isolated human being living in the corner of a city on a planet called Earth, fighting to survive and hopefully thrive. However, through mindfulness I began to discover a totally different and satisfying dimension of myself that I’d overlooked. Mindfulness helps you to see things from a more holistic perspective. Having a sense of a deeper dimension and connection with the world around you puts the waves of life’s challenges into a much bigger context. If you’re the ocean, what trouble do waves give you?

Inscribed above the ancient Greek temple of Apollo at Delphi is the phrase ‘Know thyself,’ a vitally important concept for Greek philosophers like Socrates. But self-reflection isn’t advocated so much in the twenty-first century!

Who are you? What is this incredible thing called life? These are the questions I’ve often grappled with. While making money and spending time with friends was fun, it lacked any sense of depth. So I found myself in a mindfulness class. Life was too wonderful and mysterious to be lived without meaning or purpose.

Mindfulness helps you to put things in perspective. If you go from place to place, rushing to finish all that stuff on your to-do list, and when you’re done are so exhausted that you just collapse in front of the television, you may have a bit of a problem discovering who you truly are in the meantime. By taking some time to be mindful, you’re giving yourself the opportunity to stop and look at all these incessant thoughts and emotions that come and go, and discover the sense of being that’s behind the mind chatter. A part of yourself that’s peaceful, joyous and whole.

This book describes one approach to discovering your sense of self that I’ve found immensely liberating and fascinating. Self-discovery is a personal journey, so you may have a totally different way of understanding your deep, inner being.

Read each of these paragraphs as slowly as you can. Notice your judgements and desire to agree or disagree with the statements. Try doing neither, and instead just read and reflect.

• Are you just your body? Your body is made up of hundreds of millions of cells. Cells are dying and re-forming all the time. Every few years, pretty much all the cells in your body are replaced with new ones – so your body is completely different to the one you had as a baby. Right now, you’re digesting food, your nails and hair are growing, and your immune system is fighting any diseases within you. It’s all just happening – you’re not doing it. Even if your body becomes totally paralysed, the sense of you being here will still be present. The very fact that you say ‘my body’ suggests that the body is something you have, rather than your core self.
• Are you just your thoughts? Thoughts keep coming, no matter how mindful you are. The fact that you can be aware of your thoughts means that you are separate from them. If you were your thoughts, you wouldn’t be able to notice them. The fact that you can observe your thoughts means they’re separate and a space lies between you and what you think. In mindfulness practice, you can step back from your thoughts from time to time, but you can’t control thoughts. Do you even know what you’re going to think in the next few minutes? No. But can you be aware of your thoughts? Yes.
• Are you just your emotions? Just as you can observe thoughts, you can also observe your emotions. Doesn’t this mean you’re separate from your emotions? Emotions arise and eventually pass away. If you were your emotions, then your emotions would never pose any problem at all. You would be able to control emotions and wouldn’t choose to have negative feelings.

So, what are you? What’s left? Let’s call it the observer self. There’s no specific word in the English language for this. If you’re the observer, you can’t be that which you observe. In this sense you can say you are awareness. Thoughts and ideas, emotions and images, desires, fears and actions arise in you but you’re aware of them all. Everything arises in awareness, in being. That’s what you are. You aren’t just the thought ‘I’m Shamash’ or ‘I’m Jane;’ you’re that sense of presence that underlies experience.

Some of the attributes of awareness or the observer self are:

• You’re always aware. Sometimes that awareness is lost in thoughts and dreams; sometimes it’s connected with the senses.
• Awareness happens by itself. Awareness is different to attention. Attention or mindful awareness is something to be cultivated and trained, which is what most of this book is about, but pure awareness is your inner self. To be aware takes no effort. You don’t need to do awareness. Awareness is effortlessly operating right now as you read. You can’t turn off or run away from awareness!
• Awareness comes before thought. As a baby, you had awareness without words and ideas. Thoughts and concepts come after awareness.
• In terms of awareness, you’re both ‘no-thing’ and everything. Without awareness, nothing would exist for you. With awareness, you’re a part of every experience you have. This sounds contradictory, but look into these concepts yourself. Ask yourself what your daily experience would be like without awareness.

Having read all these attributes of awareness, what’s your reaction? Whether you believe these ideas or not isn’t important; what is important is examining and exploring these ideas for yourself. As Socrates said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ I’ve personally found looking deeper into my identity to be completely transformative and liberating – mindful self-discovery is the ultimate exploration for me!

Spend a few minutes resting as an observer of your moment-to-moment experience. This can turn out to be an incredibly peaceful experience. That’s a meditation in itself. No need to react to your thoughts, emotions, or any other sensations. Just watch the experiences arise and fall again. Be the observer self. And if you find yourself trying too hard, don’t forget to smile! That’ll remind you that this is a non-doing process – not just another thing that requires a lot of effort. To experience this further, see the sitting mediation in Chapter 6. It’s called ‘open awareness’.