Chapter 10

Dealing with Setbacks and Transcending Distractions

In This Chapter

Dealing with setbacks in mindfulness practice

Overcoming common problems

Transcending distractions

When you first learnt to walk you must have fallen over hundreds, if not thousands, of times before you could balance on two legs. But you didn’t give up. You probably giggled, got up, and tried again. Learning meditation, a powerful way of deepening mindfulness, is a similar process. When you first try to meditate, you’re going to fall over (well, not literally I hope, unless you’re trying the lesser-known hopping-on-one-leg meditation). But setbacks are part of the process of meditation. The question is how you deal with them. If you see setbacks as learning opportunities rather than failures, you’re bound to succeed. Each time a problem occurs, you simply need to get up and try again, with a smile if possible. In the end you may realise that meditation isn’t about achieving a certain state of mind, but about meeting each experience in a warm, accepting way. This chapter shows you how.

Everyone accesses mindfulness in their own sweet way. For you, the mindfulness meditations in this book may just not feel right. In such a case, you can cultivate mindfulness through gardening, cooking, running, cleaning or some other way. If meditating really doesn’t appeal, consider which daily activity you could do, or already do, in a mindful way, by fully focusing your attention in that moment. Walking your dog in a local park, for example, can be your daily meditation if done consciously and with an open mind. Discover your unique daily mindful moment.

Getting the Most out of Meditation

Mindfulness meditation means setting aside time to intentionally pay attention to a certain aspect of your experience with a kindly acceptance from moment to moment, as best you can. So, for example, you can pay attention to your breathing as it enters and leaves your body, accepting the rate of the breathing just as it is. Mindfulness meditation can also go on to consciously be aware and open to all your experiences from moment-to-moment – you breath, body, sounds, the thought about your shopping list, the feeling of boredom and so on.

Ultimately, you have nothing to get out of meditation. I know that sounds pretty crazy, but it’s an important point. Meditation isn’t a way of getting something, because you already have everything you need to be whole and complete. Rather, meditation is about letting go. All the benefits of meditation (which I cover in Chapter 2) are best seen as side effects. Meditation is about being with whatever your experience is, whether pleasant or unpleasant, and seeing what unfolds. Meditating is a bit like doing your favourite hobby. If you like painting, you paint. If you paint for the love of painting rather than looking for an outcome, you paint in an effortless and joyful way. Meditation is like painting: if you spend your time looking for the benefits, you kind of spoil the fun.

Making time

If you’re interested in developing the art of meditation, try engaging in some form of meditation every day, called formal practice. Whether you choose to meditate for five minutes or one hour is up to you, but making a daily connection with meditation has a profound effect.

Too busy to meditate daily? I know the feeling. Life is full of so many things to do that finding time to practise meditation can be hard. But you find time to brush your teeth, get dressed, and sleep. You find the time for chores, because you have to. You don’t feel right if you fail to do these things. Meditation is like that too. Once you get into the rhythm of daily meditation, you don’t feel right if you haven’t had your daily fix of it. That’s when you find the time to meditate.

The great thing about mindfulness is that you can practise it at any time. Right now, you can become aware of the fact that you’re reading. You can feel the position of your body as you’re reading this sentence. That’s mindfulness. When you put this book down and walk somewhere, you can feel the sensations of your feet on the floor, or the tension in your shoulder, or the smile on your face. When you’re aware of what you’re doing, that’s mindfulness.

Practising mindfulness actually saves time. Research has found that meditators work more efficiently than others. Or, you may say that meditation makes time.

Rising above boredom and restlessness

Boredom and restlessness are like opposite poles of an energy scale. Boredom is associated with a lack of enthusiasm and connection, whereas restlessness implies energy that’s pumping through the body, itching to burst out. Mindfulness is designed to observe both of these states and find a balance between the two.

Boredom

Meditation can sound like the ultimate boring activity. Sit there and do nothing. What could be more boring? Even watching paint dry may sound like a more exciting prospect. Society seems geared up to help you avoid boredom. Television adverts are short and snappy to grab your attention, and mobile phones help to distract you at any moment that a hint of boredom arises. These continual forms of distraction make you bored more quickly and more easily. Meditation is a courageous step against the tide.

If you feel bored during meditation, you’re not really being mindful. Boredom generally implies a lack of connection, or that you’re thinking about the past or future instead of the present. If you’re finding attending to your breathing boring, imagine if your head was plunged into water: you’d suddenly become very interested in breathing! Each breath is unique and different. Noticing feelings of boredom and moving your focus back to your breathing is all part of the process of mindfulness, and quite natural.

Excessive feelings of boredom may indicate that you’re forcing yourself into the mindfulness practice. Try easing off your effort and bringing self-kindness to your practice. Feel your breath with a sense of friendliness and warmth. Watch your bodily sensations in the way you watch a puppy or cute little baby. And try practising the loving kindness meditation (kindly head to Chapter 6 for more on this).

The following techniques can help you work with the feelings of boredom during meditation:

• Acknowledge the feeling of boredom. Boredom is the feeling that has arisen, so accept it in this moment.
• Notice the thoughts running through your mind. Perhaps, ‘Ohhhh, I can’t be bothered!’ or ‘What’s the point of doing this?’.
• Get interested in boredom. Allow yourself to become curious. Where did the boredom come from? Where’s it going? Can you feel boredom in certain parts of your body? Notice the desire to sleep or do something else other than continuing to practise.
• Connect your attention to the sensations of breathing and see what happens to boredom.
• Take a step back from the emotion of boredom. If you’re aware of the boredom, you’re not the boredom itself. Observe the boredom from this stance of a decentred, detached awareness, as if the boredom is separate from you.

Observing boredom can be very interesting. When boredom arises, you see the thoughts and feelings that run through you every time you get bored. These feelings can rule your life without you noticing. As you become aware of them, the feelings begin to loosen and let go. Your mental programmes are shadows, and through the light of mindfulness the programmes lose their apparent reality and disappear, without you doing anything much.

Restlessness

Restlessness is similar to boredom, but is associated with excessive levels of energy, and is a common mental state. You run around all day doing a million and one things and then when you sit down to meditate, your mind’s still racing.

Try these two ways of coping with restlessness:

• Begin your meditation practice with some mindful movements. You may choose to do some mindful walking or perhaps mindful yoga (both talked about in Chapter 6). This helps to slowly calm your mind so that you’re able to practise some sitting or lying down meditations.
• Observe your restlessness without reacting to it. Feel the restlessness in your body. What’s your mind telling you to do? Continue to sit, despite what the mind says. This is a powerful meditation, a routine that gently trains the mind to do what you tell it to do rather than the other way around. You’re beginning to take control, rather than your mind being in control. Just because your mind is restless you don’t have to run around like a headless chicken doing what it tells you to. The mind can say things like, ‘Oh, I can’t stand this. I need to get up and do something.’ You can watch this show going on in the mind, breathe into it, and guide your attention back to the inhalation and exhalation. You can even answer back in your head, saying words like, ‘Thank you mind for your activity. But let’s continue to practise mindfulness for a little bit longer. Then we can move around after that.’

Staying awake during mindful meditation

Due to the stresses of life or constant busyness and digital stimulation, you may not be getting enough sleep. Or your sleep may not be of a high quality. In either case, you may find yourself falling asleep rather than ‘falling awake’ in your mindfulness practice. That’s okay. You probably need sleep more than mindfulness anyway. So allow yourself the time to sleep restfully. No need to fight with yourself. Then, once you’ve caught up on your sleep, mindfulness can start to help you feel more awake in a refreshed and rejuvenated way.

Ultimately, sleep and mindfulness are opposites, as shown in Figure 10-1. When you fall asleep you’re at a low level of consciousness – lower than during normal everyday life. Mindfulness is designed to heighten your state of awareness, so that it’s greater than it is during your normal daily existence.

Sometimes your mind makes you feel sleepy in order to avoid the mindfulness practice. Sleepiness during mindfulness meditation is very common and you’re certainly not alone if you experience it. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Sometimes, becoming sleepy is a clever trick your mind plays to prevent you from facing up to difficult thoughts or emotions (see the later section ‘Getting over difficult emotions’). If you start to feel sleepy, begin to recognise the feeling.

Try these suggestions to cope with or avoid sleepiness:

• Ensure that you get enough sleep. If you don’t get enough sleep, you’re likely to fall asleep in your next meditation.
• Take a few deep, slow breaths. Repeat a few times until you feel more awake.
• Don’t eat a big meal before meditating. If you feel hungry before a meditation, eat a small snack beforehand rather than a three-course meal.
• Stand up and do some mindful stretching, yoga, tai chi or walking. Then go back to your sitting or lying-down meditation.
• Experiment with meditating at different times of day. Some people feel wide awake in the mornings, others in the afternoon or evening. Find the right time for you.
• Open your eyes and let some light in. In some meditation traditions, all meditations are done with eyes half or fully open for the duration of the practice. Experiment to see what works for you. When doing this, continue to focus on your breath, body, sounds, sights, thoughts, or emotions – whatever you’ve decided to make the focus of your mindful awareness.
• Become mindful of the state of mind called sleepiness. This is difficult, but worth a try. Before you feel too sleepy, notice and get curious about how your body, mind, and emotions feel. This can sometimes dissipate the sleepiness and enable you to cope with it next time it happens.

Ironically, one of the first benefits of meditation that many of my students report is better sleep. Through practising mindfulness meditation, people seem to be able to allow difficult thoughts to be released from the brain, enabling the state of sleep to arise more naturally when necessary.

If you do find yourself falling asleep despite your best efforts, don’t worry about it too much. I find many of my students overly criticising themselves for falling asleep. If you fall asleep, you fall asleep: you probably needed it. Enjoy the snooze; night-night!

Finding a focus

When you sit for meditation, how do you decide what to focus on?

Think of your breathing as your anchor. A ship drops its anchor whenever it needs to stop. By being mindful of a few breaths, you’re dropping your anchor. These breaths bring your body and mind together. Breathing can be conscious or unconscious, and focusing on breathing seems to have a wonderful way of creating a state of relaxed awareness. Your breathing also changes with your thoughts and emotions, so by developing a greater awareness of it you can regulate erratic feelings on a daily basis. The simple sensations of your breath as it enters and leaves your body can be like drinking an ice-cool, refreshing drink on a hot, stuffy day. So, don’t forget to breathe.

After you feel you’ve established your attention on breathing, you can go on to focus on bodily sensations, thoughts, feelings, or the different parts of the body, as I describe in Chapter 6.

Re-charging enthusiasm

When you’ve established yourself in a mindfulness meditation practice, getting into a routine is easy. The habit of practising mindfulness regularly is certainly helpful, but not if you do so in a mechanical way. If you get the feeling that you’re doing the same thing every day and keep falling asleep, or you just sit there with no real purpose, then it’s time to re-charge your enthusiasm.

Here are some ideas for firing up your enthusiasm:

• Do a different meditation practice. Look through this book or refer to the resources in Part III for ideas.
• Join a meditation group or go on a retreat. One or other is almost certain to shift something in you. See Chapter 9 for tips on this.
• Try doing your practice in a different position. If you normally sit, try lying down or walking. You can even dance, skip or do the can-can and be mindful at the same time.
• Change the time when you practise meditation. Usually morning is best, but if you’re just too sleepy then, try after work or before lunch, for example.
• Treat yourself to a day of mindfulness. Spend the whole day – right from the moment you open your eyes in the morning to the time you go to bed at night – doing nothing in particular, apart from being mindful. Let the day unfold naturally, rather than controlling it too much. Give yourself permission to enjoy the day.
• Get in touch with a mindfulness meditation teacher or try attending a course or workshop. See whether there’s a good teacher in your area, through a Google search. Some readers of this book have attended my live online mindfulness teacher training or coach training; by learning ways of helping others to meditate, they discovered more about their own mindfulness practice too. Get in touch with my team to find out more by emailing [email protected] or visiting shamashalidina.com

Practice is important, whether you feel enthusiasm or not. Keep going, and see what benefits you gain from your practice in the long term.

Dealing with Common Distractions

Distractions – whether internal or external – are a part of mindfulness experience in the same way as these words are part of this book. They go hand in hand. If you find yourself frustrated, criticising the distraction, and getting annoyed, feel it, let it be part of the mindfulness practice, and gently guide your attention back to the breathing or the focus of your meditation.

Getting frustrated can be a mind pattern, and watching and noticing the frustration rather than reacting to it may gradually change the pattern. Being distracted during meditation is a very common experience, a part of the learning process. Expect some frustration, and then see how to cope with it rather than trying to run away from it.

Reduce external distractions to a minimum. A few precautions to take are:

• Switch off or unplug all your phones.
• Turn off all televisions, computers, and pretty much anything electronic.
• Ask anyone else in your home to give you some quiet time if possible.

The very effort you make to reduce distractions can have a beneficial effect on your practice. If you still get distracted, remember that everyday events always get in the way of the practice; listen to the sounds and let them become part of the practice rather than blocking them out.

You can manage internal distractions in the following ways:

• Just do it. If you need to deal with something particularly urgent or important, do it before you start meditating. Your mind can then be at rest during the meditation.
• Take a step back from thoughts. Watch the stream of thoughts that arise in your mind like clouds that pass across the sky. See the thoughts as separate from you, and note what effect that separation has.
• Welcome your thoughts for a while. This is a great approach. Just allow all the thoughts to enter your consciousness. Welcome them. You’ll probably find that the more you welcome your distractions, the fewer distractions pop into your head. It’s a fun experiment!
• Be patient. Remember that it’s natural for the mind to think. Label each thought with a word such as ‘thinking’ or ‘planning’, and then gently invite the attention back to your breathing.

Handling unusual experiences

Meditation isn’t about getting a certain experience, but about experiencing whatever is happening right now. Blissful experiences come and go. Painful experiences come and go. You just need to keep watching without holding onto either. The practice itself does the rest. Meditation is far, far simpler than people think.

In meditation you may sometimes experience floating (just imaginary; I’m not talking about levitating yet!), flashing lights, flying pigs, or pretty much anything the mind can imagine. Whatever unusual feelings arise, remember that these are just experiences and come back to the focus of the meditation. In mindfulness you don’t need to judge or analyse these experiences: simply let them go, as far as you can, and then come back to the senses. If you find yourself really struggling or feeling unwell, gently come out of the meditation and try again later; take things slowly, step by step.

Learning to relax

The word ‘relax’ originally comes from the Latin word meaning to loosen or open again. Relax is such a common word. ‘Just relax,’ people say. If only it were so simple. How do you relax during meditation? Essentially by learning to accept the tension you’re currently experiencing, rather than fighting with it.

Consider this scenario. You feel tense. Your shoulders are hunched up, and you can’t let go. What do you do? Try the following steps if tension arises during your meditation:

1. Become aware of the tension. Get a sense of its location in your body.
2. Notice whether the tension has an associated colour, shape, size, or texture. Allow yourself to be curious about it rather than trying to get rid of the tension.
3. Feel right into the centre of the tension and breathe into it. Feel the tense part of the body as you simultaneously feel your natural breathing. Just be with the tension as it is. Say words like ‘softening’ in your mind to see what effect that has.
4. Notice whether you have any feeling or desire to get rid of the tension. As best you can, let go of that too and see whether you can accept the sense of tension a little bit more than you do already.
5. Send kindness to that part of your body. You can do this by gently smiling towards the sensation, or by placing your warm hand on the tension and caring for that part of your body or wishing that part of your body well. Say to yourself words like, ‘May you be well, may you soften, may your tension ease.’ Showing a sense of affection for this part of your body is probably the best way to ease the tightness in the long run.

Fighting to let go of tension just leads to more stress and tension. That’s because trying implies effort, and if the tension doesn’t disappear you can end up more frustrated and angry. A warm, gentle acceptance of the feeling is far more effective.

Meditation can lead to very deep relaxation. However, relaxation is not the aim of meditation: meditation is ultimately an aimless activity.

Developing patience

Whenever I’m at a party and I’m asked what I do, I explain that I’m a trainer of mindfulness meditation. One of the comments I often get back is along the lines of, ‘Oh, you must be patient. I don’t have the patience for teaching anything, let alone meditation.’ I don’t think patience is something that you have or don’t have: you can develop it. You can train your brain to become more patient. And it’s a muscle worth building.

Meditation is patience training. To commit to connect with the breath or the senses requires patience. If you feel impatient in your meditation practice but continue to sit there, you’re beginning to train the patience muscle. Observe the feeling of discomfort. See whether your impatience stays the same or changes. Just as your muscles hurt when you’re training in the gym, sitting through impatience is painful, but gradually the feelings of impatience and discomfort diminish. Keep pumping that iron!

You may be impatient for results if you’re a beginner to mindfulness. You’ve heard of all the benefits of meditation and so you want some. That’s fair enough. However, because meditation requires patience, when you begin to practise regularly you’ll see that the more impatient you are, the fewer ‘results’ you get.

Decide how long you’re going to practise mindfulness meditation for, and stick to it. Take the meditation moment by moment and see what unfolds. You spend all your life trying to get somewhere and achieve something. Meditation is a special time for you to let go of all that and just be in the moment. As well as requiring patience, meditation develops it.

If you can’t cope with being still and feeling your breath for ten minutes, try five minutes. If that’s too much, try two minutes. If that’s too much, try ten seconds. Begin with however long you can manage, and build it up, step by step. The most important thing is to keep at it, practise as regularly as you can, and gradually increase the time you practise for. Eventually, you’ll become a super-patient person. Think of those huge bodybuilders who started off skinny but by taking small steps achieved Olympic weightlifting standards. Believe that you can develop patience, and take the next step.

Learning from Negative Experiences

Think back to the first time you met a dog. If your first encounter with a dog was pleasant, you’re likely to think that dogs are wonderful. If, as a child, the first thing a dog did was bite you or bark excessively, you probably think dogs are aggressive. Your early experiences have a big impact on your attitudes and ways of coping later in life. By learning to see that a negative experience is just a momentary thing rather than something that lasts forever, you can begin to move forwards.

Meditation is similar. If you happen to get lucky and have a few positive experiences to start with, you’ll stick with it. But if you don’t, please don’t give up. You’ve only just begun the journey, and you have a lot more to discover. Stay with it and work through any negative experiences you encounter.

Dealing with physical discomfort

In the beginning, sitting meditation will probably be uncomfortable. Learning to cope with that discomfort is an important hurdle to jump in your meditation adventure. When the muscles in your body get used to sitting meditation, the discomfort will probably diminish.

To reduce physical discomfort when meditating, you can try several things:

• Sitting on a cushion on the floor:
  • Experiment with using cushions of different sizes.
  • Slowly and mindfully stand up, stretch with awareness, and sit back down.
• Sitting on a chair:
  • Try raising the back two legs of the chair using books or wooden blocks, and see whether that helps.
  • You may be sitting at an angle. Gently lean forwards and backwards and to the left and right to find the middle point.
  • Ask a friend to look at your posture to check that you look straight.
  • Ensure that you’re sitting with a sense of dignity and uprightness, but not straining too much.

You can always lie down for mindfulness practices. You don’t have to sit up if it’s too uncomfortable for you. There’s no rules here. Do what feels right for you.

Getting over difficult emotions

Many of my clients come to mindfulness with difficult emotions. They suffer from depression, anxiety, or are stressed at work. They’re trying to cope with anger, lack of confidence, or are burnt out. Often they feel as if they’ve been fighting their emotions all their lives and are now just too tired to keep fighting. Mindfulness is the final resort – the answer to coping with their difficulties. What mindfulness asks of people (to stop running away from themselves and to transcend difficulties as they arise in awareness, moment by moment) is both very simple and very challenging. As soon as you get a glimmer of the effect mindfulness has, your trust in the process grows and a new way of living emerges.

The next time you face difficult emotions, whether you’re meditating or not, try the following exercise:

1. Feel the emotion present in the here and now.
2. Label the emotion in your mind, and repeat it (perhaps ‘fear, fear’).
3. Notice the desire to get rid of the emotion, and as far as you can, gently be with it.
4. Be mindful of where you feel the emotion in your body (most emotions create a physical sensation in the body).
5. Observe the thoughts running through the mind.
6. Breathe into the emotion, allowing your breathing to help you observe what you’re feeling with warmth and friendliness. Say in your mind, ‘It’s okay. Let me gently be with this feeling. It will pass.’
7. Become aware of the effect of this exercise on the emotion for a few moments.

Try to get a sense of the gentleness of this exercise. Look at the emotion as you would a flower: examine the petals, smell its fragrance, and be tender with it. Think of the emotion as wanting to talk to you, and listen to it. This is the opposite of the normal way people meet emotion, by bottling it up and running away.

If this all sounds too overwhelming, take it step by step. Make the tiniest step you can manage towards the feeling. Don’t worry about how small the step is: it’s the intention to move towards the difficult emotion rather than run away that counts. A very small step makes a massive difference, because it begins to change the pattern. This is the positive snowball effect of mindfulness.

When you first move towards difficult emotions, they may grow bigger and feel more intense, because you’re giving them your attention. This is absolutely normal. Try not to get frightened and run away from these emotions. Give yourself some time, and you’ll find that your emotions flux and change and aren’t as fixed as you’ve always believed.

Emotions behave in only three ways when you become mindful of them. The emotion will either grow, stay the same or diminish. That’s it. And eventually, all emotions will pass – that’s the way they work. Remembering this is a powerful meditation in itself.

Accepting your progress

Mindfulness meditation is a long-term process: the more time and appropriate effort you put in, the more you get out of it. Mindfulness isn’t just a set of techniques that you do to see what you get immediately: it’s a way of living. Be as patient as you can. Keep practising, little and often, and see what happens. Most of the time your mind may wander all over the place and you may feel you’re not achieving anything. This isn’t true: just sitting down and making a commitment to practise daily for a certain time has a tremendous effect; you just can’t see its effect in the short term.

Think of meditation as planting a seed. You plant the seed in the most nourishing soil you can find, you water it daily, and you allow it to grow in a sunny spot. What happens if you poke around in the soil to see how it’s doing? You disturb the progress of course. Germinating a seed takes time. But there’s no other way. You just need to regularly water your seed and wait.

Be patient about your progress. You can’t see a plant growing if you watch it, even though it’s actually growing all the time. Every time you practise meditation you’re growing more mindful, although it may seem very difficult to see from day to day. Trust in the process and enjoy watering your seed of mindfulness.

Going beyond unhelpful thoughts

‘I can’t do meditation’ or ‘It’s not for me’ are some comments I heard when I was last at a health and wellbeing conference. These attitudes are unhelpful, because they make you feel as if you can’t meditate, no matter what. I believe everyone can learn meditation. ‘I can’t do meditation’ actually means ‘I don’t like what happens when I look at my mind.’

Some common thoughts with useful antidotes to remember are:

• ‘I can’t stop my thoughts.’ Mindfulness meditation isn’t about stopping your thoughts. It’s about becoming aware of them from a detached perspective.
• ‘I can’t sit still.’ How long can you sit still for? A minute? Ten seconds? Take small steps and gradually build up your practice. Alternatively, try the moving meditations detailed in Chapter 6.
• ‘I don’t have the patience.’ Meditation is perfect for you! Patience is something you can build up, step by step, too. Start with short meditations and increase them to increase your patience.
• ‘It’s not for me.’ How do you know that if you haven’t tried meditating? Even if you’ve tried it once or twice, is that enough? Commit to practising for several weeks or a few months before deciding whether mindfulness meditation is suitable for you.
• ‘This isn’t helping me.’ This is a common thought in meditation. If you think this, just make a mental note and gently guide your attention back to your breathing.
• ‘This is a waste of time.’ How do you know that for sure? Thousands of scientific studies and millions of practitioners are unlikely to be wrong. Mindfulness meditation is beneficial if you stick to it.

Thoughts of failure have an effect only if you approach meditation with the wrong attitude. With the right attitude, there’s no failure, only feedback. By feedback, I mean that if you think your meditation didn’t work for some reason, you now know what doesn’t work and can adjust your approach next time. Think of when you were a child learning to talk. Imagine how difficult that must have been! You’d never spoken in your life and yet you learnt how to talk at only a few years old. As a young child you didn’t know what failure meant, so you kept trying. Most of the time what came out was ‘ga-ga’ and ‘goo-goo’, but that was okay. Step by step, before you knew it, you were speaking fluently.

There’s no such thing as a good or bad meditation. You sit down to practise meditation – or you don’t. It doesn’t matter how many thoughts you have or how bad you feel in the meditation. What matters is trying to meditate and making a little effort to cultivate the right attitude.

Finding a Personal Path

The journey of mindfulness is a personal one, although it affects every person you meet, because you interact with them in a mindful way. Many people have walked the path before, but each journey is unique and special. In the end you learn from your own experience and do what feels right for you. If meditation doesn’t feel appropriate, you probably won’t do it. However, if some quiet, calm voice or feeling underneath all the chatter seems to resonate with the idea of mindfulness, you begin taking steps. You decide in each moment the next course of action that can best deal with setbacks and distractions. These choices shape your personal mindfulness journey.

Approaching difficulties with kindness

When you face a difficulty in life, how do you meet it? How you relate to your difficulty plays a big role in the outcome. Your difficulties offer you a chance to put mindfulness into practice and see these difficulties in a different way. How do you meet problems? You can turn towards them or away from them. Mindfulness is about turning towards them with a sense of kindness rather than avoidance.

Difficulties are like ugly, scary shadows. If you don’t look at them properly, they continue to frighten you and make you think they’re very real. However, if you look towards them, even though the difficulties scare you, you begin to understand what they are. The more light you shine on them, the more they seem to lose their power. The light is mindfulness or a kindly awareness.

People can be very unkind to themselves through self-criticism, often learnt at a young age. The learnt behavioural pattern of self-criticism can become like an automatic reaction any time you face difficulties or you make mistakes. The question is, how do you change this harsh, critical inner voice that keeps attacking you? The mindful approach is to listen to it. To give it space to say what it wants to say, and to listen, but in a gentle, friendly way, as you may listen to a young child or a piece of beautiful music. This ends up breaking down the repetitive, aggressive tone, and ends up calming and soothing the self-criticism a little. Just a tiny shift in your attitude towards these thoughts makes all the difference in dealing with difficulties.

If a strong memory or worry of a past or present difficulty comes up in your practice of meditation, try taking the following steps:

1. Become aware of the fact that something challenging has come up for you that keeps drawing your attention.
2. Observe what effect this difficulty has on your physical body and emotions at the moment.
3. Listen to the difficulty as you would listen to a friend’s problems, with a warm sense of empathy rather than criticism.
4. Say to yourself words like, ‘It’s alright. Whatever the difficulty is, it will pass, like everything else. Let me feel it for this moment.’
5. Accept the difficulty just as it is for the time being.
6. Breathe into it and stay with the sensations, even if they seem to grow larger at first. With practice, stay with the feeling of the difficulty for longer.
7. When you’re ready, gently go back to the focus of the meditation.

Everyone experiences difficulties of varying degrees from time to time. Mindfulness is here to help you to be with the difficulty if you can’t change the circumstances that are causing it.

Understanding why you’re bothering

In the middle of your mindfulness meditation practice, you may start thinking, ‘Why am I bothering to do this?’ and ‘I’m wasting my time.’ This is quite normal and part of the process of learning to meditate. Simply notice the thought, gently say to yourself ‘thinking, thinking’, and turn your attention back to the breath or other focus of meditation. When you practise for a while and begin to see the benefits of meditation, your trust in the process grows and your doubts diminish.

If you feel as if you’ve forgotten why you’re practising meditation in the first place and are lacking motivation, refer to Chapter 3.

Realising that setbacks are inevitable

When I first learnt to meditate, I tried too hard. I thought I had to get something. I sat up extremely straight in a stiff way, rather than comfortably. Each time my mind wandered away from the breath, I hauled it back instead of kindly guiding it back to the breathing. I waited for an experience. I kept trying to clear my mind completely. Sometimes it felt wonderfully blissful, and I thought I’d got it! But then it went away. So, there I was again, trying to get it. I felt I was going through setback after setback.

In fact, I was going through a learning process, beginning to understand what meditation was all about. You can only have a setback if you’re trying to get something or go somewhere. If you have no goal, you can’t really have a setback. Ultimately, meditation is about letting go of goals and being in the here and now.

Imagine you’re sitting at home and you decide you’re going to go home. What do you need to do? You guessed it: nothing! You’re already there. The journey of mindfulness is like that. You feel as if you’re getting closer to true meditation, but really each moment you practise is true meditation, no matter what your experience.

Setting realistic expectations

If you think that mindfulness meditation is going to make you feel calm and relaxed and free of all problems straight away, you’re going to have a hard time. When you first learn to drive, you don’t expect to be an expert after one lesson. Even after you pass the test, it takes years to become a good driver. Meditation, like any other learning experience, takes time too. Have realistic expectations about meditation.

Here are ten realistic expectations to reflect on:

• ‘My mind will wander around. This is what happens in meditation, even if it’s for a few breaths.’
• ‘There’s no such thing as a good or bad meditation. It’s like when a small child does a scribble for drawing. It just is what it is.’
• ‘Mindfulness isn’t about getting certain experiences. It’s about being with whatever arises, moment to moment, with acceptance.’
• ‘I’ll sometimes feel calm and sometimes feel agitated and tense in meditation. With time, the calmness will increase.’
• ‘Meditation is a long-term practice. I’ll gradually learn to let go of my expectations as I practise.’
• ‘It may be difficult to motivate myself to practise every day, especially at the beginning. Some days I may forget to practise. That doesn’t mean I should immediately give up.’
• ‘Sometimes I may feel worse after the meditation than before. This is part of the learning process that I need to understand.’
• ‘I can never know how I’ve benefited from meditation. I can only practise every day and see what happens.’
• ‘Even after years of meditation, I may sometimes feel I haven’t progressed. This isn’t a fact but an idea. Meditation works below conscious awareness, and so I can’t know what’s happening there.’
• ‘The more I practise, the easier it gets.’

Looking at change

Humans are creatures of habit. Once you get into a habit, you effortlessly do it day after day without a second thought. So, for change to last and become effortless, it needs to become a new habit – in this case, the habit of mindfulness. When you establish a pattern of mindfulness, your brain immediately begins to change, gradually transforming your experience of life for the better.

Creating a new habit pattern results in new neurons firing in your brain. And neurons that fire together, wire together. As you practise regularly, the neural pathways in your brain involved in being mindful begin to link up, thereby creating a healthy habit.

To create a habit of mindfulness meditation try the following:

1. Decide on a plan of action: how long you’ll meditate for every day and at what time.
2. Stick to the plan whether you feel like it or not.
3. If you forget to meditate on the odd day, don’t give up. Slipping up is natural. Pick up and start again. As I keep emphasising, be kind to yourself rather than berating yourself.
4. Assess your progress after four or eight weeks, and make changes if necessary. Make a new plan, perhaps meditating for a longer duration.

Creating a habit of mindfulness meditation sounds so simple. However, the difficult bit is Step 2. You listen to thoughts saying things like ‘Don’t bother today,’ or you give in to feelings of tiredness or restlessness. This is your moment to challenge the usual way in which you behave. You can practise what you committed to, or you can follow the old habit pattern. Listen to what you decided to do in the first place, and stick to the practice as best you can. As soon as you’ve established the habit of mindfulness, you find yourself becoming mindful without even thinking about it – the neurons in your brain have wired together. Step by step you can change.