Chapter 4

Growing Healthy Attitudes

In This Chapter

Developing key mindful attitudes

Understanding ‘heartfulness’

Dealing with unhelpful attitudes

The greatest discovery of our generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. As you think, so shall you be.

William James

The three important aspects to mindfulness are intention, attitude and attention (explained fully in Chapter 3). This chapter focuses on attitude.

When it comes to attitude, you have a choice. If you’re aware of your outlook, you can begin to choose to change it for the better. Attitude isn’t about what happens in your life, how successful you are or even how you feel. You can be feeling the emotion of frustration but think, ‘Hey, at least I’m aware of it’ or ‘This is just a feeling’ or ‘This is a chance for me to understand the feeling of frustration’. Changing your attitude is difficult but is possible. By choosing mindful attitudes towards your moment-to-moment inner and outer experiences, you begin to release self-limiting beliefs and live life with greater fluidity.

Think about singing. What’s your attitude towards singing? Maybe you love it and can’t wait to jump up on the stage. If you don’t care what other people think, or think you’re a great singer, then belting out your favourite song isn’t a problem. However, if you think you must do it right or worry about what others think, you may be more hesitant to sing and this affects your feelings, mood and how you actually sound.

Knowing How Attitude Affects Outcome

A school once had six different ability groups for maths. Each year, the same maths teachers taught the same ability level in the subject. One year the head teacher decided to experiment. She picked a teacher at random, who turned out to be the teacher of the second from bottom set. The head told the teacher how good she was and that she’d give her the top set for maths next year. The teacher’s attitude and expectations for the class totally changed when she received her new class. She knew that the top set should get the top grades as they always had. She taught them accordingly and, sure enough, the pupils achieved straight A grades. The amazing thing was that the class wasn’t really the top set at all, but was the second from bottom set. Because the teacher had changed her attitude and expectations for the class, the students rose to the challenge and produced outstanding results. This experiment goes to show the power of attitude.

How does attitude affect the quality of mindfulness meditation? Well, if your attitude is ‘Mindfulness is really hard,’ then you try very hard to get somewhere. If your attitude is ‘Mindfulness is easy’ and you then struggle, you may begin to get frustrated. If your attitude is ‘I don’t know how it’ll go. I’m going to give it a good go and see what happens,’ you’re prepared for whatever arises.

Attitudes are the soil in which your mindfulness practices grow tall and strong. A rich, nutritious soil nourishes the seed of mindfulness and ensures that it grows well. Each time you practise mindfulness, you water the seed, giving it care and attention. However, if that soil deteriorates through unhelpful attitudes, then the young seedling will begin to wither. A plant needs regular watering to grow–; a lack of care and attention results in it perishing.

Discovering Your Attitudes to Mindfulness

Attitudes can become habits – both good and bad. And attitudes, like habits, aren’t easy to change. You need to work to improve your attitude. Begin by discovering your current attitudes towards mindfulness, stillness, silence and non-doing. Then, through understanding and effort, you can develop attitudes that are more conducive to a regular mindfulness practice.

Get pen and paper and answer the following ten questions to help you discover what your attitudes towards mindfulness meditation are:

1. What do you hope to get out of practising mindfulness?
2. Why are you practising mindfulness?
3. What experiences do you expect to arrive at through practising mindfulness?
4. How long do you think it’ll take before you notice the benefits of mindfulness?
5. What physical sensations do you expect during or after a mindfulness meditation?
6. What are your past experiences of mindfulness? Do you continue to hold onto them or have you let them go?
7. How much effort are you willing to put into the practice? Will you practise mindfulness several times a day, once a day, once a week or whenever you feel like it?
8. When you hear the word ‘meditation’ or ‘mindfulness’, what sort of thoughts and feelings arise?
9. How will you know that you’re doing your mindfulness practice correctly?
10. What’s the best thing about mindfulness?

Now, look at your answers. Do you notice any patterns? Are you very positive about the potential benefits of mindfulness? Are you negative about mindfulness? Or are you indifferent and do you just want to experiment, like being a scientist of your own mind?

Try to be non-judgemental towards your answers. See them as just the way things are. If you can’t help being caught up in thinking, ‘That’s good’ or ‘Oh, that’s a really bad attitude, what’s wrong with me?’, notice that too. Your mind is simply coming up with judgements.

Developing Helpful Attitudes

This section contains the key foundational attitudes that provide a base from which you can build a strong mindfulness practice. These attitudes help you to handle difficult sensations and emotions, overcome feelings of lethargy and generate energy for taking action. Without these attitudes your practice may become stale and your intention may weaken, along with your power to pay attention in the present moment. Some helpful ways of approaching your practice are developed through experience; others are available right from the start.

Think of these key attitudes like strawberry seeds. If you’re hoping to taste the delicious strawberries, you need to plant the seeds and water them regularly. In the same way, you need to water your attitudes regularly, by giving them your mindful attention. Then you can enjoy the fruit of your efforts in the form of a sweet, delicious strawberry. I’m a sucker for strawberries.

Although the attitudes identified in this section seem separate, they feed into and support each other. Any one of these attitudes, pursued and encouraged to grow, inadvertently supports the others.

Understanding acceptance

Acceptance turns out to be one of the most helpful attitudes to bring to mindfulness. Acceptance means perceiving your experience and simply acknowledging it rather than judging it as good or bad. You let go of the battle with your present-moment experience. For some people, the word ‘acceptance’ is off-putting–; replace it with the word ‘acknowledgement’, if you prefer.

By acceptance, I don’t mean resignation. I don’t mean, ‘If you think you can’t do something, accept it’ – that would be giving up rather than accepting. I’m talking about your experience from moment to moment.

For example, when you feel pain, whether it’s physical, such as a painful shoulder, or mental, such as depression or anxiety, the natural reaction is to try to avoid feeling the pain. This seems very sensible, because the sensation of physical or mental pain is unpleasant. You ignore it, distract yourself, or perhaps even go so far as turning to recreational drugs or alcohol to numb the discomfort. This avoidance may work in the immediate short term, but before long, avoidance fails in the mental and emotional realm.

By fighting the pain, you still feel the pain, but on top of that, you feel the emotional hurt and struggle with the pain itself. Buddha called this the ‘second arrow’. If a warrior is injured by an arrow and unleashes a series of thoughts like, ‘Why did this happen to me?’ or ‘What if I can never walk again?’ that’s a ‘second arrow’. You may inflict this on yourself each time you feel some form of pain or even just a bit of discomfort, rather than accepting what has happened and taking the next step. Avoidance – running away – is an aspect of the ‘second arrow’ and compounds the suffering. Acceptance means stopping fighting with your moment-to-moment experience. Acceptance removes that second arrow of blame, criticism or denial.

A useful formula to remember is:

Suffering = Pain x Resistance

The more your resist the pain you’re experiencing, the more you suffer. The pain is already there. Resisting the pain compounds your difficulties. Acceptance teaches you to let go of the resistance and therefore ease your suffering.

Perhaps you meditate and feel bombarded by thoughts dragging you away again and again. If you don’t accept the fact that your mind likes thinking, you become more and more frustrated, upset and annoyed with yourself. You want to focus on your mindfulness practice, but you just can’t.

In the above example:

• First arrow: Lots of thoughts entering your mind during meditation.
• Second arrow: Not accepting that thoughts are bound to come up in meditation; criticising yourself for having too many thoughts.
• Solution: Acknowledge and accept that thoughts are part and parcel of mindfulness practice. Let go of your resistance. You can do this by gently saying to yourself, ‘Thinking is happening’ or ‘It’s natural to think’ or simply labelling it as ‘thinking … thinking’.

By acknowledging the feeling, thought or sensation and going into it, the experience changes. Even with physical pain, try experimenting by actually feeling it. Research has found that the pain reduces.

But remember, you’re not acknowledging it to get rid of the feeling. That’s not acceptance. You need to try to acknowledge the sensation, feeling or thought without trying to change it at all – pure acceptance of it, just as it is.

Maybe even relax into the discomfort. One way to relax into the discomfort is by courageously turning to the sensation of discomfort and simultaneously feeling the sensation of your own breath. With each out-breath, allow yourself to move closer and soften the tension around the discomfort.

If all this acceptance or acknowledgement of your pain seems impossible, just try getting a sense of it and make the tiniest step towards it. The smallest step towards acceptance can set up a chain of events ultimately leading towards transformation. Any tiny amount of acceptance is better than none at all.

Another aspect of acceptance is to come to terms with your current situation. If you’re lost, even if you have a map of where you want to get to, you have no hope of getting there if you don’t know where you are to start with. You need to know and accept where you are. Then you can begin working out how to get to where you want to be. Paradoxically, acceptance is the first step for any radical change. If you don’t acknowledge where you are and what’s currently happening, you can’t move on appropriately from that point.

Here are some ways you can try to cultivate acceptance:

• Gently state the label of the experience you aren’t accepting. For example, if you’re not accepting that you’re angry, state in your mind, to yourself, ‘I’m feeling angry at the moment … I’m feeling angry’. In this way, you begin to acknowledge your feeling.
• Notice which part of your body feels tense and imagine your breath going into and out of the area of tightness. As you breathe in and out, say to yourself, ‘It’s okay. It’s already here … It’s already here’. Allow the muscles around the sensation to soften and release if you can.
• Consider how much you accept or acknowledge your current thoughts/feelings/sensation on a scale of 1 to 10. Ask yourself what you need to do to increase your acceptance by 1, and then do it as best you can.
• Become really curious about your experience. Consider, ‘Where did this feeling come from? Where do I feel it? What’s interesting about it?’ In this way, the curiosity leads you to a little more acceptance.

In the realm of emotions, the quickest way to get from A to B isn’t to try and force yourself to get to B, but to accept A. Wholehearted acceptance leads to change automatically.

Discovering patience

Helen Keller, the American deaf-blind political activist, is quoted as saying: ‘We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.’ The quote makes a valid point. If every time you practised mindfulness, you were filled with joy and peace, you wouldn’t need that wonderful attitude of patience. The reality is that challenging thoughts and emotions sometimes arise in mindfulness, like in any activity. The important thing is how you meet and welcome those feelings.

Although you can experience the benefits of mindfulness after a short period of time, research shows that the more time you dedicate to cultivating mindfulness, the more effective the result. Mindfulness meditation is a training of the mind and training takes time.

If you’re a naturally rather impatient person, mindfulness meditation is the perfect training for you. Patience, like all the attitudes I talk about in this section, is a state you can develop through regular effort. Attitudes are muscles you can train in the gym of the mind.

Here are some ways you can develop your patience:

• Whenever you’re in any situation where you begin to experience impatience, see this as an opportunity to practise mindfulness of thoughts. This means becoming fascinated by the kind of thoughts that are popping into your head. Are they all true? What effect are the thoughts having on your emotional state? What are the thoughts all about?
• The next time you’re driving and see an amber light, stop safely rather than speeding through it. See how that makes you feel. Repeat this several times and notice if it becomes easier or more difficult to be patient.
• Rather than frantically choosing the shortest queue at the supermarket checkout, just choose the nearest one. Connect with any feelings of impatience that arise and bring a sense of curiosity to your experience, rather than immediately reacting to your impatience.

When having a conversation with someone, spend more time listening rather than speaking. Let go of your initial urge to speak, and listen more. Listening can take tremendous effort, and is excellent patience training. Each time you practise, you train your brain to become slightly more patient.

Seeing afresh

Seeing afresh is normally referred to as the beginner’s mind, a term that was first used by the Zen master Suzuki Roshi. He once said: ‘In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.’ What does that mean?

Consider a young child. Children, if they’re fortunate enough to be brought up lovingly, are the greatest mindfulness teachers in the world! They’re amazed by the simplest thing. Give babies a set of keys, and they stare at them, notice the wide range of colours reflected in them, shake them and listen to the sound – and probably giggle too. Then, of course, they taste the keys!

Children epitomise the beginner’s mind. They see things as if for the first time, because they’re not filled with ideas, concepts, beliefs, names or thoughts about the right or wrong thing to do. Babies don’t intellectualise. They connect with the raw sensory data entering their minds and they love it. Young children are naturally mindful, and that mindfulness is a true joy for them.

You can see life in a similar way. You can cultivate this attitude of the beginner’s mind, of seeing things afresh – you just need to make a little effort. Try this exercise:

1. Sit or lie down in a relaxed and comfortable posture and close your eyes.
2. Now imagine you’ve been blind from birth. You’ve never experienced colour before. You’ve heard people talking about it, but you can’t even imagine colour. Spend at least five minutes doing this. When you find your mind wandering off into thoughts, gently guide it back to this exercise.
3. When you’re ready, gently open your eyes as if you’re seeing for the first time. See with the beginner’s mind. Enjoy the range of colours and forms in front of you. Notice how your mind automatically names different objects. Bring your attention back to the awareness of the variety of colours, shadows and reflections. You may even begin to notice things you’ve never noticed before; that’s a sign that you’re engaging with the beginner’s mind and seeing things anew.
4. Continue with this beginner’s mind attitude as you go about your activities today, and be with each experience as if for the first time.

When you experience the state of the beginner’s mind, you live in a world of fascination, curiosity, creativity, attention and fun. You’re continuously discovering and looking out with the eyes of a child. You’re in ‘don’t know’ mind. When you think, ‘I know what’s going to happen’ or ‘I know what the breath feels like,’ you stop looking. You don’t know what’s going to happen; you just think you do. Each moment is fresh. Each moment is different and unique. Each moment is the only moment you have.

If you’re a beginner at mindfulness, you’re in an enviable position. You really are in the beginner’s mind! However, by the time you practise your second mindfulness meditation, you may begin comparing it with your first one and think, ‘It was better last time’ or ‘Why can’t I concentrate now?’ or ‘This is it. I’ve got it!’. You start to compare, conceptualise or condemn. When this happens, try to let it go – as much as you can – and bring your attention back to the here and now, as if you’re engaging in this for the very first time. I’m not saying that the beginner’s mind is an easy attitude, but it’s fundamental to sustaining a long-term meditative discipline.

Mindful living is about living life afresh. One cool way to do this is to reduce the amount of planning you do. Leave some days unplanned. That way, you make space for new and exciting things to emerge. Most of the time, life doesn’t go to plan anyway – so don’t try too hard to stick to a schedule. You can even try letting go of planning your work occasionally. When I give a talk without planning, I don’t know what I’ll say, and it’s more fun both for my audience and me. I’m forced to live in the present and respond to the moment; mindfulness arises spontaneously.

Finding trust

Without a certain degree of trust, mindfulness meditation is challenging. This is because trust helps you to continue believing in the process of mindfulness when you feel that nothing’s happening or something ‘wrong’ is happening. For example, if you’re meditating and you suddenly feel bored, you need to trust that this is just another feeling, and that by continuing to practise mindfulness, that feeling may go away or it may not. Or, you may find that by the end of a mindfulness practice, you feel a bit worse than when you started. Without trust, you won’t be able to see that this is just a temporary experience which, like all experiences, won’t last forever.

Trust takes time to develop in relationships. You can’t expect to meet people and immediately trust them. You need to see how they behave, what they say, and how they treat you and others. With time, with patience, trust grows. And with that growing trust, the relationships deepen, mature and become more meaningful. A relationship that lacks in trust has little beauty. With trust comes warmth, friendship and a feeling of connection – you feel at ease and comfortable in a trusting relationship. Your relationship with mindfulness is similar. You may not trust in the process to begin with, but with patience, dedicated and regular practice, you may begin to trust it. The more you trust in its power to heal and restore you, the more you relax into it and allow mindfulness to happen to you, in a sense, rather than trying to do mindfulness. Mindfulness is an act of non-doing, or being, which arises out of the security of trust.

Here are some ways of building your trust:

• Decide how long you’re going to try meditation for and stick to it. So, if you want to try meditation for four weeks, for 20 minutes a day, just do it. Be prepared to find it harder to practise on some days than others, and begin to trust in the process.
• If you’re scientifically minded, look up all the research on mindfulness and meditation available, in this book or elsewhere. This may help to convince you to stick to the discipline.
• If you know someone else who regularly practises mindfulness, ask her about her relationship with it. Consider meditating with her to help you.
• Give mindfulness time. Be patient with it as far as you can, and your trust will naturally grow with time.
• Try trusting your own experience, in the here and now. What is your intuition trying to tell you?

Cultivating curiosity

Einstein was a master of curiosity. He thought that curiosity was an essential part of a fulfilling life. Einstein is quoted as saying:

‘The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvellous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.’

Curiosity is the basis of all true learning. If you’re curious, you want to find out something new: you want to gain some new knowledge. A curious person is fully connected with her senses. If you’re curious, you look around intently and earnestly to see something you haven’t seen before. You ask lots of questions, both of yourself and others. These can be questions like, ‘Why is the sky blue?’ or ‘Why is that shadow over there faint, whereas this one is much darker?’. Or it may be questions about yourself, like ‘I wonder why I feel tired after eating X?’ or ‘Where do thoughts come from?’ or ‘What happens to the feeling of frustration if I try to feel it in my body and breathe into it?’.

Bringing curiosity to your mindfulness practice is especially helpful. In fact, with curiosity, mindfulness automatically arises: you naturally begin to pay attention and, with a sense of wonder, to notice what’s happening. Take the example of thought: if you’re really curious about the types of thoughts that you have over a period of ten minutes, you pay attention and watch thoughts in your mind as best you can. That’s mindfulness. If your curiosity is genuine, you’ll probably keep watching those thoughts until that curiosity is satisfied.

How can you develop curiosity in mindfulness? I say, by asking questions. Here are some questions you can ask yourself before a mindfulness practice, to get you started:

• What happens if I practise mindfulness every day for 20 minutes for four weeks, whether I feel like it or not?
• What occurs if I put more effort into my mindfulness practice? What if I put in less effort?
• What if I sit or lie down really still, even if I have the urge to move. What happens then?
• Where in the body do I feel positive emotions? Where do I feel negative ones? What shape and colour do the emotions have, if any?
• What effect does having a gentle smile while meditating have on my practice?

I could go on and on with thousands of questions to ask. Try to come up with some of your own; your own curiosity is more powerful than anything I give you.

Ask yourself a question and investigate. Feed your curiosity and see what you discover. Allow your curiosity to spread from your mindfulness practice to your day-to-day living. Become curious about your thoughts, emotions and physical sensations rather than just ignoring them or trying to instantly change them.

Experimenting with doing things differently is a great way to fuel your curiosity and increase your mindfulness. For example, today I thought, ‘How can I brush my teeth in a different way, just for fun?’. The answer came: stand on one leg. So I brushed my teeth while balancing on one leg. I was surprised at how much more mindful I was. Rather than automatically brushing and letting my mind wander, I was conscious of keeping my balance. You probably think I’m mad – perhaps you’re right! But the point I’m trying to make is that if you do things differently that immediately makes life a bit more fun and a bit more mindful too. What can you do differently today?

Mindfulness is like a laboratory, where you come up with ideas, observe, watch, see what happens and perhaps draw conclusions. Keep asking yourself questions, and keep going in that way. Mindfulness gives you the opportunity to find out more about yourself and the workings of your own mind and heart, and when you understand that, you understand not only yourself, but everyone else, because everyone has essentially the same processes going on. Humans are far more similar than you may think.

Letting go

Imagine I told you to hold a glass of water absolutely still. In fact, imagine I said that I’d give you whatever you wanted if you held the glass of water perfectly still. You’d probably try very hard and the glass might look quite still, but if you or anyone else looked really carefully at the water, you’d notice that it was still moving. I suspect that the harder you tried to hold the glass still, the more you’d shake it as you felt more worried or nervous about being 100 per cent still. The best way for the glass of water to be still would be for you to let it go and put it down on a solid surface. Then the water would stop moving.

Nature has many beautiful examples of letting go. Apple trees need to let go of their fruit so that the seeds inside can germinate. Animals need to let go of their young so they can find out how to fend for themselves. Young birds need to let go of any fear they feel when they first jump off a branch to begin to fly. You’re always letting go of each breath of air to make room for the next one. This last example shows that you naturally know how to let go all the time, in one sense. Remember this the next time you’re struggling to let go.

Letting go is the essence of mindfulness. Thoughts, emotions, ideas, opinions, beliefs, emotions and sensations are all to be observed, explored and then let go. If you’re struggling to understand or practise mindfulness, try letting go. Just gently practise as best you can and see what you discover – you’ll be on the right track.

How do you let go? Imagine you’re holding a tennis ball in your hands, and you’re asking me how to let go. Letting go isn’t something you do. Letting go is about stopping the doing. To let go of something, you stop holding onto it. The first step is to realise you’re holding onto the object in the first place. If you’re walking around holding a tennis ball, you can’t let go if you don’t know that the ball is in your hands. Once you know that the ball is there and feel the tension in your hands, you automatically let go.

Here’s a short mindfulness exercise on the practice of letting go. Have a go and see what arises for you. You can use the accompanying guided audio (MP3 Track 5) if you wish.

1. Find a comfortable posture. You don’t even need to close your eyes if you don’t want to.
2. Notice, right now, the position of your body. Can you feel any physical tension in your body? Which parts feel warm and which ones cold? Does the tension have a shape, a colour, a texture? Be aware of what they are. What happens to the tension and tightness as you become aware of them? Do they release or stay there?
3. Become aware of any emotions that are touching you at the moment. What happens when you observe them? Get a sense of how strong the emotion is. Don’t try to let go. Putting effort into letting go just creates more tension. Instead, become aware of it and allow the emotion to take its own course. Let the emotion let go of itself if it wants to. If the feeling lingers on, can you be okay with that and accept it as it is?
4. At the end of this short exercise, see whether you’re willing to let go of anything that you found out – anything that you’re holding onto, trusting that you have within you all that needs to be known.

Developing kindness

Kindness is my religion.

Dalai Lama

This is one of the most important of all attitudes you can bring to your mindfulness practice. Your awareness of your breath, or your body or sounds, or whatever you’re paying attention to, can have a quality to it. The quality can be cold, harsh and incisive, or it can be warm, kind, friendly, forgiving, caring, gentle – in other words, loving. By bringing a sense of friendliness to your experience, the experience – whether it’s pleasant, unpleasant or neutral – is transformed.

Because kindness is such an important attitude, I go into this in more detail in the next section.

Figure 4-1 is the tree of mindfulness. The growth and development of the tree of mindfulness represents your own inner capacity to be mindful. Watering the roots represents the effort you make to cultivate the mindful attitudes and practise mindfulness. The fruit represent the benefits you naturally gain from the effort you put into being mindful. ‘As you sow, so shall you reap’ is the essence of mindfulness; this is why the fruit from your own tree of mindfulness is the same as the roots.

Over time, as you continue to look after the tree of mindfulness within you, the tree strengthens and matures. Your roots grow deep into the earth and your tree stands firmly earthed to the ground, offering shade to those around quite naturally. Mindfulness is firmly established within your being.

Appreciating ‘Heartfulness’

With attentiveness, a marksman can shoot an innocent person, a thief can plot a bank robbery, and a drug baron can count his money. But this isn’t true mindfulness – mindfulness isn’t pure attention alone. In Eastern language, the word for mind and heart is often the same, which is heartfulness. Instead of Mindfulness For Dummies, this book could just as easily be called Heartfulness For Dummies. Heartfulness is giving attention to anything that you can perceive with a sense of warmth, kindliness and friendliness, and thereby avoid self-criticism and blame.

Understanding mindfulness as heartfulness

Here are some ways of specifically generating warmth and friendliness, along with attention. You need to give each of these exercises at least five minutes for best effect. Try to generate an intention rather than a feeling.

• Look at something in front of you in the same way as you may look into the eyes of a beautiful child, or at a flower. Bring a sense of affection to your visual perception, whatever that may be, for a few minutes. Note what happens.
• Listen to your favourite piece of relaxing music. This may be a piece of classical music, New Age music, or perhaps it’s the sounds of nature, such as birds singing or the wind rustling through the trees.
• Smell the aroma in the room around you or of the food on your plate, in the same way that you smell the most beautiful scent of a perfume.
• When you next eat, take a few moments to feel your breath. You may find this difficult, because the habit is to dive in and munch, but hold back if you can. Now remember how lucky you are to have food to eat at all. Chew each morsel fully before you tuck into your next helping. Savour the taste.
• Notice the sense of touch as you walk from one place to another. Slow down as much as you can and feel the sensations in the feet. Imagine that your feet are kissing the earth with each step you take. Visualise yourself walking on precious ground, and allow yourself to be fully immersed in the sense of contact.
• As you walk around, notice other people and wish them happiness. Think ‘May you be happy’. See whether you can make your wish genuine, from your heart.
• Listen to any negative thoughts or emotions in yourself. Perhaps you’re habitually critical of yourself for having these feelings. Try a radically different approach: befriend your negative thoughts. Bring a sense of warmth and kindness to your anger, jealousy or frustration. Listen to yourself compassionately as you would to a good friend – with care and understanding. What happens?

Developing an Attitude of Gratitude

Gratitude is considered by some as the greatest of all emotions that can be cultivated. Recent studies are beginning to show that gratitude has a unique relationship with wellbeing, and can explain aspects of wellbeing that other personality traits cannot. An attitude of gratitude goes hand in hand with mindfulness.

You’re grateful when you’re aware of what you do have rather than what you don’t. The effect of this is an opening of the heart. When you’re aware with an open heart, you’re in a deeper mindful mode.

Gratitude is a skill that you can develop. If you’re bad at tennis or playing the piano, with practice you get better. The same is true of gratitude. Through repeated effort you can develop, strengthen and intensify gratitude. Flex your gratitude muscle by trying this exercise, which is almost guaranteed to make you more grateful:

1. Think of something you’re not grateful for. Perhaps you’re not grateful for your job, a relationship or your place of residence.
2. Now think of all the things that are good about it. Give yourself two minutes, and challenge yourself to come up with as many good things as possible. For example, if you’re not happy with your job: Does it pay you good money? How much time do you get off? Is there a pension or medical plan with the job? Do you like any of your colleagues? Do you get breaks? Does working make being at home more pleasurable? Think of as many positive aspects for which you’re grateful. To supercharge this exercise rather than just thinking about it, write down your answers. Be aware that you may have to overcome some resistance to doing this, especially if you’re very ungrateful about the situation.
3. Try this exercise again for other areas of your life. See what effect that has on them. Again, remember that the exercise takes some effort, but the rewards make it worthwhile.
4. Commit to doing this regularly for a week or a month on a daily basis. You may find yourself being naturally more grateful for all sorts of other things too, including meditation.

Letting go through forgiveness

Life has its difficulties. And you’re bound to get hurt by others, often wrongly so. The danger comes when you carry this hurt around with you. If you don’t let the emotional pain go, the next time something hurts you, the suffering accumulates. Over a period of years, the hurt can feel like you’re walking around carrying a heavy sack everywhere you go. Your shoulders feel tense. Your face is screwed up. You’re tense and uptight.

This harmful state of mind requires forgiveness for you to feel happier. Being annoyed with someone else hurts you rather than anyone else. You may admire hearing about others forgiving in situations of hatred, but when you’re called upon to do so yourself, you’re stuck. You may find yourself feeling angry, depressed or hateful. Many studies now show that releasing and letting go of past hurts through forgiveness leads to a longer and happier life.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean what the other person did to you was right or okay. It means you’re willing to let that go so you can move on and live a happier life. Forgiveness is an act of kindness towards yourself. And through that self-kindness, you naturally become a nicer person to be with for others too.

Try this approach to begin to allow yourself to forgive:

• Understand that hating someone else doesn’t actually hurt that person at all.
• List all the beneficial things that have emerged from a situation. Try to see the situation from a totally different perspective. Ask a trusted friend to help you if you’d like to.
• Be compassionate with yourself. If you’ve been ruminating over a problem for some time, perhaps now’s the time to let it go. You don’t deserve all this hurt you’re carrying around with you.
• Understand that the story you’re telling yourself is just that: a story. This pain and hurt may be repeating itself in your mind through a story. Try letting go of the story, or seeing the story from another person’s perspective. Something may shift that will help you forgive.
• Wish the person well. If someone has hurt you, counteract that with some loving-kindness meditation. Wish the person well, just as you may wish yourself or a friend well. Use the loving-kindness meditations in Chapter 6 to help you.

An alternative practice is to do a forgiveness meditation. You can choose to listen to the guided audio (MP3 Track 4) that comes with this book. The steps are:

1. Sit in a comfortable and relaxed position. Let your eyes close, if that feels comfortable, and allow your breath to find a natural rhythm.
2. Imagine or feel the breath going into your heart. Become aware of and feel the obstructions you’ve created in your heart due to a lack of forgiveness, whether for yourself or others. Become mindful of the heartache from a lack of forgiveness in your core.
3. Now you can ask forgiveness of others. Say to yourself: ‘Let me become aware of the many ways that knowingly or unknowingly I’ve caused others pain and suffering though my own fear, pain or anger.’ Visualise each person who comes to mind – feel the sorrow and pain they feel due to your words and actions. Now, finally, release this sadness, sorrow and heartache by asking for forgiveness. As you imagine or feel each person’s presence, say: ‘I ask for your forgiveness. Forgive me.’ Repeat this slowly as many times as you feel appropriate, speaking from the heart.
4. Now you can move on to forgiving yourself. You’ve hurt yourself in many ways through thoughts, words or actions. You may have done this consciously – or unconsciously, without even knowing it. Allow yourself to become mindful of any unkindness you’ve directed towards yourself. Feel the suffering you’ve caused yourself and begin to release this by saying: ‘For all the ways I have been causing suffering to myself through thoughts, words or actions, consciously or unconsciously, I forgive myself. I forgive myself as far as I can.’
5. Now you can move on to forgive other people who’ve hurt you. You’ve been hurt by many people through their words or actions, knowingly or unknowingly. They’ve caused you suffering in your being to different degrees. Imagine the ways they’ve done this. Become aware, feel the pain others have caused you, and allow yourself to let go of this sadness from your heart with the words: ‘I’ve been hurt by others many times, in many ways, due to the pain, sorrow, anger or misunderstanding of others. I’ve carried this suffering in my being for long enough. As far as I’m ready to, I offer my forgiveness. To those who’ve hurt me, I forgive you.’ Repeat these phrases if you want.

With time and practice, you may feel a shift in your heart and be able to forgive. If the shift doesn’t happen, notice how you feel, and be soft and kind with yourself. Let the forgiveness be genuine. Forgiveness takes time, so be patient and practise the meditation regularly. With regular commitment, you’ll be able to release yourself from the sorrow you’re carrying, through gentle forgiveness.

Tackling Unhelpful Attitudes

Just as you have helpful attitudes to cultivate in your mindfulness practice, you also have unhelpful attitudes that you’d be better off staying away from. For example, if you’re a bit of a perfectionist and are worried you’re going to fall asleep in your mindfulness practice, you don’t need to start panicking, or worrying when you start struggling to stay awake. You just need to become aware of the perfectionist mindset and, as best you can, let the unhelpful approach go.

The most unhelpful thing you can do with mindfulness is not to practise. Once you begin practising regularly, in no matter how small a way, you may begin to discover which attitudes to nurture in your meditation and which are unhelpful.

Avoiding quick-fix solutions

If you want a quick fix for all your problems, you’ve come to the wrong place. Mindfulness is simple but not easy. Mindfulness is a powerful process that takes time, and a certain type of effort, energy and discipline. You can find quick fixes in the domain of television advertising, billboards and the Internet. I know these temptations are great, and marketing companies spend billions to work out how to convince you to part with your hard-earned cash. Unfortunately, however, in my limited experience of instant happiness, that form of happiness is just that: instantly present and instantly gone.

What you can do is integrate mindfulness practices into your life in short bursts. You don’t have to sit for hours and hours in the lotus posture. One minute of mindful attention on your breath on a daily basis can begin to shift something within you. The more you put in, the more you get out. Five minutes is better than one minute. You need to decide what’s right for you: trust in yourself to make a decision and stick to that choice for a period of time.

Mindfulness meditation is not about how long you can sit still for. If that was the case, roosting chickens would be Zen masters. What really matters is the quality of your intention, attention and attitude.

Overcoming perfectionism

‘I’ll meditate as soon as I’ve sorted my life out.’ ‘I’ll do the course when things are totally settled.’ ‘I’ll practise mindfulness when I have no more problems in my life.’ These excuses are common and, on the whole, unconstructive. Sometimes you do need to allow major events in your life to settle before you work on a new skill like mindfulness. However, you can’t wait for life to become perfect. You don’t have time to waste. If you’ve found a way to systematically and thoroughly create a meaningful way of producing further health and wellbeing in your life, why not take the first step? Yes, you may get it wrong and make mistakes, but imperfection, mistakes and stumbles are an integrated part of the process of finding out about anything. No child ever began to walk without falling. No driver ever learns to drive without stalling. Take the first step today.

Finding out from failure

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.

CS Lewis

There’s no such thing as a bad mindfulness practice. There’s no failure in meditation. If mindfulness was about success and failure, it’d be like any other activity in life. But mindfulness is different – that’s the beauty of it. I list here some experiences that people think made them fail at being mindful, and reasons why they aren’t ‘failures’:

• ‘I couldn’t concentrate. My mind was all over the place.’ You can’t concentrate continuously. Sooner or later your mind goes into thoughts, dreams, ideas or problems. The nature of the mind is to wander off. Lack of concentration is an integral part of mindfulness. Expect your mind to wander and be pleased when you’ve noticed, then gently bring your attention back.
• ‘I couldn’t sit still.’ Your body is designed to move. If sitting really isn’t for you, remember you can do mindfulness while you move. Try walking meditation (Chapter 6), exercises that integrate awareness, like yoga or tai chi, or any other action you choose, in a mindful and therefore meditative way. You’re cultivating awareness, not a motionless body.
• ‘I felt bored, tired, frustrated, angry, annoyed, jealous, excited or empty.’ You’re going to feel a variety of emotions in your mindfulness practice, just as you do in your everyday life. The difference is, instead of reacting to them automatically, you’ve got the valuable opportunity to watch them rise and fall. In the long run, these emotions will probably calm down a bit, but in the meantime you need simply to be aware of them – if you can, enjoy the show!
• ‘I had the experience of X (replace X with any negative experience), which I didn’t like.’ People have both pleasant and unpleasant experiences in mindfulness meditation. The experience may be anything from deep sadness to feeling you’re disappearing, or your arms may feel as if they’re floating up. My theory is that your mind is releasing knots within your psyche out into your conscious mind, and freeing you from your own conditioning. This is part and parcel of the process – let the process unfold by itself if you feel you can. If you find the feeling coming up is a difficult one, try saying to yourself: ‘This too will pass.’

If you’re struggling a lot in your mindfulness practice, you’re probably holding onto a desire for something. Maybe you desire to get rid of tension, a feeling of irritation, your mind wandering, or boredom. Maybe you’re trying to get peace of mind, focus or relaxation. Make peace with your mindfulness practice. Let go of your desire to get anything out of the practice. Then, paradoxically, you’ll find the practice far more enjoyable and peaceful.

If you find yourself becoming very concerned or frightened in your mindfulness practice, and if the feelings are ongoing, you may need professional support for what’s coming up for you. Get in touch with your doctor or suitable therapist.