Читать книгу Mindfulness in Eight Weeks: The revolutionary 8 week plan to clear your mind and calm your life - Michael Chaskalson - Страница 7
ОглавлениеWe’re going to begin this week with the eating meditation I talked about in the Introduction. By eating just one small raisin, mindfully, I hope you’ll get a deeper sense of some of what mindfulness is all about. So have your raisin or your small section of a fruit or vegetable handy and get ready to play ‘The Raisin Exercise’ (1 15mins) on your audio player.
If you don’t want to listen to the exercise right now, you could read about it instead in Box 1.
If you’re going to listen to the audio, get yourself into an upright and alert but relaxed posture, let the raisin or whatever you’re using instead rest on one of your open palms and play the audio now.
Box 1: The Raisin Exercise
Get hold of a single raisin and find somewhere quiet where you can sit for 10 or 15 minutes and give your full attention to this exercise.
1. Holding
Let the raisin rest in your palm. Take a few moments to become aware of its weight.
Then become aware of its temperature – any warmth or coolness it may have.
2. Looking
Give the raisin your full attention, really looking.
Become aware of the pattern of colour and shape that the raisin makes as it rests on your palm – almost like an abstract painting.
3. Touching
As best you can, being aware of the sense of movement in your muscles as you do this, pick up the raisin between the thumb and forefinger of your other hand.
Explore the outside texture of the raisin as you roll it very gently between the thumb and forefinger.
Squeeze it ever so slightly and notice that this might give you a sense of its interior texture.
Notice perhaps that you can feel this difference just with your thumb and forefinger – the interior texture and the exterior texture.
4. Seeing
Lift the raisin to a place where you can really focus on it and begin to examine it in even greater detail.
Notice highlights and shadows. See how these change as it moves in the light.
Notice how facets of it appear and disappear – how it may seem to have ridges and valleys and how these may shift and change.
5. Smelling
Again aware of the sense of movement in your muscles, begin to move the raisin very slowly towards your mouth.
As it passes by your nose you may become aware of its fragrance. With each inhalation, really explore that fragrance.
Become aware of any changes that may be taking place now in your mouth or stomach – any salivation, perhaps.
6. Placing
Bring the raisin up to your lips. Explore the delicate sensation of touch here.
Now place it in your mouth but don’t chew.
Just let it rest on your tongue, noticing any very faint flavour that may be there –
or maybe not.
Feel the contact it makes with the roof of the mouth, perhaps.
Now move it to between your back teeth and just let it rest there – again without chewing.
Notice any urges or impulses in the body.
7. Tasting
Now take a single bite. Just one. Notice any flavour.
Then take another bite. Notice any change in flavour.
Then another bite, and another.
8. Chewing
Now slowly, very slowly, chew.
Be aware of sound, of texture, of flavour and of change.
Keep chewing in this way, very slowly, until there is almost nothing left to chew.
9. Swallowing
When there is almost nothing left to chew, swallow. See if you can be aware of the intention to swallow as it first arises.
10. Finishing
Follow what is left of the raisin as it moves down towards your stomach and you lose sight of it altogether.
How does your body feel now as you’ve completed that exercise?
What did you notice that you might not have been aware of before?
There’s no telling what you will find when you do this exercise. We’re all different and we all come to the process with our own unique histories and ways of seeing. What’s really important here is that you allow your experience of doing that exercise simply to be what it was – there is no right or wrong way of doing it. What’s really key is that you notice and reflect on what you actually experienced. What was it like, in detail, for you?
You might want to spend a few moments now turning the experience over in your mind. What did you notice as you went through the exercise? If nothing much comes to mind, here are some things you might want to consider:
What struck you most about the exercise?
How did the raisin feel on your palm?
What did you notice as you examined its colour and shape?
What did you notice when you explored it with your fingers?
And when you looked at it more closely?
Was there any aroma? What was that like?
How did it feel in your mouth?
Were you aware of any impulses as the raisin sat between your back teeth before you began to bite and chew?
If there were, what was it like to sit with an impulse and not act on it?
What was the first bite like?
And the second?
How did it sound as you chewed?
How did it taste?
What did it feel like, eating a raisin so slowly?
Anything else?
This isn’t an exercise in trying to remember the details of the exercise. It’s more about just noticing what you noticed.
Some people find the experience deeply enjoyable. ‘I never knew what a raisin tasted like before!’ Others find it unpleasant: ‘I thought I enjoyed raisins, but actually I discovered that I really hate the taste of them – the skin was really bitter. I just never noticed that before.’ Sometimes people say the opposite: ‘I don’t like raisins, and I wasn’t looking forward to this at all, but that wasn’t bad at all. In fact I quite liked it.’ Some people comment on the shape, or the touch, or the colour, or how the smell evokes early memories. Some people find that their mind just keeps wandering off to think of other things – maybe things sparked off by elements of the experience. Some people find that they don’t experience very much at all.
We have such different experiences – some pleasant, some unpleasant. But whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant, whether there’s a lot of experience or very little, whether you stayed focused on the experience or your mind kept wandering off is neither here nor there in this context. This exercise is just about noticing what you experienced.
Most of the time, when we eat a raisin we do it on a kind of automatic pilot. We can eat raisins by the handful even – while we’re also watching television, or getting the kids ready for school, or driving, or having a conversation and so on – and we don’t notice what they feel like in our hands, what they look like, smell like or taste like.
We miss these things, but we get by. As humans, we’ve got this extraordinary capacity to do sometimes even quite complex things on automatic pilot, without needing to notice what we’re doing much.
Have you ever driven 30 miles down the road and then suddenly asked yourself ‘How did I get here?’ Most drivers have had that experience. Sometimes it’s as if we’re driving completely on automatic pilot. That really is extraordinary because, when you think about it, driving a car is a potentially lethal activity. If you are driving on a motorway, in the central lane say, at 70 miles per hour, there might be huge trucks thundering along on the inside lane at 60 miles per hour and powerful cars hurling past in the outside lane at 80 to 100 miles per hour. One twitch of the steering wheel in either direction and you’d maybe die and certainly cause mayhem. Yet you can do it completely automatically, all the time thinking, planning, dreaming or imagining – barely showing up for the journey. We do this, and we don’t find complete carnage on our motorways. Human beings are really good at automatic pilot.
When you first began to drive a car you couldn’t do that. At first, it’s all very clunky and you certainly can’t do much thinking about a complex piece of work that you have to get ready for next week when you’re still trying to figure out, in real time, which of those pedals is the clutch and which the brake. You probably couldn’t even have had a light conversation while you were first trying to do that. But in time you automate all of the driving routines and off you go. You can now drive more or less automatically and your mental resources are freed up for other things.
Automatic pilot extends your capacity by creating habits and habitual behaviours that take fewer brain resources than conscious ones do – and this is a wonderful capacity. We get through our days by running a huge series of automatic routines.
For example, like most people, my wife and I have our ‘turning in for the night’ automatic routine. At some time, usually between 10.30 p.m. and 11.30 p.m., we decide it’s time to turn in and off we go – turn off the television, turn off the heating, check the back door is locked, check the cat is in, lock the front door, up the stairs, brush teeth ... and so on.
We don’t give it a thought. We don’t suddenly go ‘Oh my gosh! It’s time to go to bed. What shall we do? Where to start? I know – the back door. You check the back door and I’ll ... I’ll check the front door. Right. Done. Now what? Oh yes, the television. I’ll do the television – you do the heating. Great! Done. Now ... Cat. Where’s the cat ...?’
None of that. We just run our normal turning in for the night routine, and we have hundreds, maybe thousands of these that get us through the day.
That’s great, but there are a few problems.
On Automatic Pilot We Miss Things
When you’re on automatic pilot you can miss things. Some of what you miss can really enrich your life. Those few moments between your home and the train station in the morning, when you might have tuned in to the quality of the light or a sense of welcome freshness in the air. But you missed it because you were running your ‘thinking about my to-do list’ routine on automatic pilot – maybe already for the tenth time that morning.
In ways like this you miss so much that can enrich your life and in simple ways enhance the quality of your days – and your life. The first few buds in spring, a cobweb catching the light, the sound of a bird, the taste of a melon. They take hardly any time, but when you miss such things your life is just a tiny bit impoverished – and these things add up. When you catch them, in simple and easy ways your life gets richer and richer.
Some of what you miss can be really important. That look in a child’s eye in the morning that might have told her mum that she was being bullied at school and didn’t want to go. But her mum missed it because she was just running her familiar ‘family breakfast’ routine on automatic pilot and not paying attention. Or that tone of voice in a colleague’s greeting in the morning that says he’s got real problems at home that he really needs to talk about as they’re affecting his work. But you miss it because you’re just doing your ‘arriving at work’ routine on automatic pilot.
So, although the capacity to do things on automatic pilot is really important and valuable, it’s also sometimes really important to come out of automatic pilot – to consciously show up for your life. A life lived mainly on automatic pilot is poorer and less effective than it might be. In some ways it’s barely a life at all.
And there are other issues as well.
Our Automatic-Pilot System can Become Overloaded
Running an automatic-pilot routine can be like opening a new window in a computer. That can be an efficient way of getting things done. But sometimes you can have too many windows open, too many routines running, and then the computer starts to slow and may even eventually crash. There’s just too much going on, too many conflicting routines running.
At work, for example, you begin to feel overwhelmed as yet another email pings into your inbox, while you’re speaking to a colleague who dropped in with an urgent request, as you were trying to work out what to do about that piece of work from last week that ran over deadline and wondering how your partner would take it if you cancelled yet another evening at home together ...
Sometimes you need to consciously come out of automatic pilot and choose to focus – but in a particular way.
At such times, it can be unhelpful to try to think your way out of the problem. That would be like opening yet another window on a computer that’s already running slowly and may be about to crash. Instead, you need to shut down some of the windows and allow your mental and emotional resources to engage with just one thing.
Mindfulness training helps you to spot when you’re overloaded before things start going wrong. It helps you to come away from automatic routines and focus more effectively on each simple passing moment.
Some of Our Automatic Routines can be Really Unhelpful
In Box 2 of the Introduction, ‘Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy’, (see here), I talked about Mary, who came home tired from work to an answerphone message from her partner saying he was going to be home late that evening. That sparked a cascade of automatic-pilot routines in Mary, which led to her low mood very rapidly escalating into depression. Whether things happen in quite that sort of way for you or not, the underlying propensity at work here is universal. We all find that one way or another we can run mental and emotional automatic-pilot routines that feed off one another in unhelpful ways and don’t serve us very well at all.
Some of us run an ‘I’m not good enough’ automatic routine. Whatever we try to do there’s a quiet inner voice in the background commenting on how we don’t quite measure up. Or we may run the opposite, an ‘I’m really great’ automatic routine, constantly evaluating ourselves against others, putting them down and trying to boost ourselves along. Or there are ‘catastrophising’ routines, where we always imagine a worst-case outcome. There is a really vast range of these unhelpful automatic routines, or cognitive distortions, that we can run and I’ve listed some of these in Box 2.
Box 2: Unhelpful Automatic Routines
Here is a list of mental habits we can have that really don’t serve us very well. See if any of these ring a bell for you.
ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING. Here, you see things in black and white as opposed to shades of grey. ‘Things never go well for me!’ Or, if a waiter fumbles your order in a restaurant: ‘This place is rubbish – our evening is ruined!’ Or if someone you admire makes a minor mistake, your admiration quickly turns to contempt.
OVERGENERALISATION. This involves making rapid generalisations from insufficient experience or evidence. A lonely person spends most of her time at home. Friends sometimes invite her to dinner so she can meet new people. ‘There’s no point in that,’ she thinks. ‘No one would like me.’
FILTERING. We all have a tendency to filter out information that doesn’t conform to our already held beliefs. Often, this involves focusing entirely on negative elements of a situation to the exclusion of the positive. For example, you’ve just given a presentation to 20 people at work. Everyone says how useful they found it. As they’re leaving, one colleague mentions a small point where she thinks there may have been some confusion. Immediately you come to think that the presentation was dreadful and you didn’t do well enough.
DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE. On being congratulated about having done something really well, you put half of the congratulation down to flattery, and say – whether out of modesty or out of doubt – ‘Well, it wasn’t that good, really.’
MIND READING. Here, you infer someone’s probable, usually negative, thoughts from their behaviour and non-verbal communication. ‘I know he doesn’t like me from the way he turned just then.’ Or you take precautions against the worst suspected case without investigating further. ‘I know writing up my thoughts for her as she asked is going to be a waste of time – she’s already made up her mind.’
FORTUNE TELLING. This involves predicting, usually negatively, the outcome of events which might turn out quite differently. Despite being very well prepared for your exam you think: ‘I just know I’m going to fail.’
MAGNIFICATION AND MINIMISATION. Here, you give more weight to a perceived failure, weakness or threat and less weight to a perceived success, strength or opportunity. Or the other way around.
CATASTROPHISING. This involves giving undue weight to the worst possible outcome, however unlikely. ‘I just know this is going to be a disaster!’ It also involves experiencing a situation as unbearable or impossible when it is just uncomfortable.
EMOTIONAL REASONING. Here, you presume that any negative feelings you may have actually expose the true nature of things or you think something is true based solely on a feeling. ‘I feel I’m stupid or boring – therefore I must be.’ Or feeling that your fear of flying in planes actually means that planes are a very dangerous way to travel.
SHOULD STATEMENTS. This involves expecting yourself and others always and without exception to do what you morally should do, irrespective of the particular situation. For example, after a performance, a concert pianist believes he or she should not have made so many mistakes. Or, while waiting for an appointment, you think that your dentist should be on time, and feel bitter and resentful as a result, without considering any possible emergency they may be having to deal with.
LABELLING. This involves attributing someone’s actions to their character instead of to some accidental attribute. Instead of just thinking that you made a mistake, you think ‘I’m a loser’ because only a loser would make that kind of mistake. Or someone who makes a bad first impression is simply ‘a jerk’ and they’re written off without further evidence of their character.
MISLABELLING. This involves describing something with language that has a strong and often unconscious connotation of other values. So someone who really values the bond between a mother and child speaks of a woman who puts her children in a nursery as ‘abandoning her children to strangers’.
PERSONALISATION. Here, you take personal responsibility, including any praise or blame, for events over which you have no actual control. For instance, a mother whose child is struggling in school automatically blames herself for being a bad mother when, in fact, the real cause of her child’s perceived failure might have been something else entirely.
BLAMING. This involves holding other people exclusively responsible for your own distress. For example, a spouse may blame their husband or wife entirely for their marital problems, instead of looking at his or her own part in the situation.
ALWAYS BEING RIGHT. Here, you always imagine that whatever goes wrong in any situation must be the fault of others.
On Automatic Pilot It’s Easy to have Your Buttons Pressed
We all have our triggers – events that happen in the world, things other people might say to us, memories or patterns of thinking that spark off one or another reactive cycle. A wife jokingly says to her husband, ‘Oh, you’re such a slob!’ and in seconds he’s gone back to being an unhappy thirteen-year-old, collapsed in on himself and struggling to re-engage. An old, established pattern of thinking, feeling, sensing and impulses kicks in, as if out of nowhere, and down he goes.
When you’re aware of your thoughts, feelings, sensations and impulses from moment to moment, that can open up much more freedom. You may begin to find that you don’t any longer have to go down the old familiar mental ruts that caused you difficulties in the past.
Mindfulness Training Opens Up Choice
Although there’s nothing wrong with automatic routines as such, some of them can be really unhelpful. With a bit of training in mindfulness, it becomes easier to spot unhelpful automatic routines for what they are. You can learn to see when you’re in danger of becoming overwhelmed and you can learn how to step out of automatic pilot at such times. You can learn how to take moments in each day to come away from automatic pilot and drop into mindful awareness. That can be powerfully renewing and enriching.
You can begin to notice some of the inner unhelpful automatic-pilot routines that you run. You might catch yourself ruminating, or catastrophising, or being unduly self-critical or whatever your particular predisposition may be. You may then begin to learn the art of recognising such thoughts simply as thoughts and to treat yourself and all your patterns and habits with warmth and kindness.
When you notice what you’re doing in your mind at such times it begins to be easier to switch your attention to somewhere else. After all, if there was that much to experience in a single raisin, what else might there be to explore and mindfully engage with?
Please note, though: mindfulness isn’t about doing things slowly. It’s about doing them with full attention. Novak Djokovic, one of the world’s most formidable tennis players, uses yoga and meditation to keep himself in good physical, mental and emotional shape – and he’s one of the fastest guys on the court!
The Body-Scan Meditation
Our next meditation is the body scan. I’ve provided two versions of this as audio files. There’s a longer version that takes around 35 minutes to complete and a shorter version of 15 minutes. The version you use for home practice will depend on which home-practice stream you’re undertaking. It would be good, though, the first time you do the practice, to try the longer version – at least once. You may, in fact, try to do that right now. If you have 35 to 40 minutes to spare and you’re not going to be disturbed, you could choose to do the body-scan practice.
The instructions we’ll be working with now are on the track entitled ‘The Body Scan (Longer Version)’ (2 35 mins). If you don’t want to do the practice at this moment, when I give the instruction to play the audio you could instead just scan Box 3 briefly to get a sense of what the practice is like.
In the body scan, you bring mindful attention to each of the different parts of your body in turn. The intention of the practice is to be awake and aware. It isn’t intended to help you be more relaxed or calm. That may happen, or it may not. Rather, the aim of the practice is to become more aware, directly sensing whatever bodily sensations (or lack of them) you find in each moment as you focus your attention on different parts of the body in turn.
Before doing the body scan, try this very brief exercise, right now, for a few moments.
Begin by looking at your hands for a few moments.
Now, spend a few moments thinking about your hands. Just let your thoughts go wherever they take you while you’re thinking about your hands.
Now, put the book to one side and clap your hands together twice – quite forcefully.
Now, feel what is going on in your hands. What sensations do you find? Tingling? Stinging? Warmth ...?
Notice the difference here between thinking about your hands and feeling your hands. It is the latter that you’re going to focus on in the body scan – your actual body sensations, in each changing moment.
In the exercise above, I first of all asked you to create a fairly obvious sensation in your hands that you could pay attention to. Most of us don’t find that extent of sensation in every part of our bodies when we do the body scan. That’s fine. The aim of the practice is simply to feel whatever sensations you actually feel, from moment to moment, even if it’s not very much at all. You might even find that there are parts of the body where it seems there is almost no sensation at all. That’s fine, it’s perfectly normal and the intention is just to notice whatever is there.
You can do the body scan either lying down on a mat or a rug on the floor or on your bed. You can also do it sitting upright in a chair. Many of us today suffer from some degree of sleep deprivation, and when you do the body scan it can be very easy to fall asleep. Although that might be refreshing, it’s not the intention of the practice. Instead, the intention is to remain as awake and as aware as you can be. If you do fall asleep for a few moments you can always just pick the practice up again. If sleepiness becomes a problem, you might find it helps to prop your head up with a pillow, to open your eyes, or to do the practice sitting up rather than lying down.
So decide how you want to do the practice now – lying down or sitting up – and when you’re ready, play the audio file ‘The Body Scan (Longer Version)’ (2 35 mins) or scan through the instructions in Box 3.
Box 3: The Body Scan
Settling
To begin with, take whatever time you need to settle into the posture you have chosen for the practice. If you’re doing this lying down, perhaps lying in a fairly symmetrical posture, with your legs uncrossed and your arms by your side. Prop your head up with a small pillow or cushion if you need to. Make sure you’re warm or cool enough and that you won’t be disturbed.
Focusing on the Breath
When you’re ready, begin to become aware of the movement of your breath and the sensations in your body. In particular, perhaps, start by becoming aware of the sensations in your belly, feeling the changing patterns of sensation there as you breathe in and out. Take a few minutes to really feel and explore those sensations. Then, become aware of any sense of touch and pressure where your body meets whatever you’re lying or sitting on. Now, you might try taking a few more deliberate out-breaths and in-breaths, maybe placing a hand on your belly to help you track the breath. With each out-breath, let yourself settle more fully into the floor or bed or chair. After a few such breaths, when you’re settled, move your hand away from your belly and just allow the breath to come and go as it does.
Scanning the Body
When you’re ready, begin to explore the changing physical sensations in your body, right now. Start by bringing the spotlight of your awareness to the big toe of your left foot. What sensations do you find there right now? Warmth, coolness, tingling, tickling? Nothing much at all? Just notice whatever’s there. As much as you can, bring a warm and kindly curiosity to whatever you find. Then, move that focus to each of the toes in turn, bringing a gentle, interested, affectionate attention to what you find, perhaps noticing the sense of contact between the toes, a sense of tingling, warmth, perhaps numbness – whatever’s there.
Then, when you are ready, on an in-breath, feel or imagine the breath entering the lungs, and passing all the way down the body, down the left leg, all the way to the toes of the left foot. And, on the out-breath, feel or imagine the breath coming all the way back up from the toes, to the foot, right up the leg and torso and out through the nose. Continue breathing in this way for a few breaths, breathing down to the toes on each in-breath, and back out from the toes on each out-breath. Practise this ‘breathing into’ as best you can, approaching it playfully, imaginatively, experimentally.
When you’re ready, on an out-breath, let go of attention to the toes, and bring your attention to the sensations on the bottom of your left foot – bringing a gentle, investigative curiosity to sensations at the sole of the foot, the instep, the heel (noticing, perhaps, the sensations where the heel makes contact with the floor or mat or bed). Experiment with ‘breathing with’ any and all sensations – being aware of the breath in the background, as, in the foreground, you explore the sensations in the bottom of the foot.
