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Imagine …

You’re sitting around the table at a family gathering. Everyone’s there: your parents, your partner, your kids, your brother and sister. It’s all been wonderfully good humoured and everyone’s having a good time. But then a subject comes up that sparks old tensions between your mother and your brother.

Your mother comments; your brother bristles and retorts.

Your mum sits up straighter in her chair and replies crossly. And they’re off.

It’s a familiar pattern. The rest of you silently, awkwardly, look on – and vainly try to steer the conversation towards something lighter.

You feel tense, upset and resigned, caught up in a family argument that’s been around for years and may be around for many years to come. You’re annoyed with your mum and brother. You wish they’d just sort this out. You’re fed up with the emotional rollercoaster that comes with these situations and you say to yourself that maybe it’s best to avoid these gatherings from now on.

However, it doesn’t have to be like this.

You can’t change your mum, your brother and the dynamic between them. But you can change how you are in the situation – and that can change everything. With AIM – Allowing, Inquiry and Meta-awareness – you experience things differently.

Here’s how it works.

Allowing has two sides to it. There’s a wisdom side and a compassion side.

With the wisdom side, you let what is the case be the case. This means recognising that this moment – this very moment, right now – couldn’t be anything other than it is. You can’t go back in time and change things so that this moment somehow turns out to be different. Right now, it is what it is. And it’s only when you can truly allow that it is what it is that you have choice about what to do next.

So, with your mum and your brother, you recognise that it is what it is. This is what it’s like and there’s no sense in wishing it could magically be different right now.

We spend so much of our time wishing that things weren’t as they are. ‘If only I were different’ or ‘if only they were different’ or ‘if only my work was different, or I had more money, or I was better looking, or fitter, or …’ Anything, really. None of that helps. It is what it is. And when we can allow that, we begin to have some real choice about what we do next.

This moment can’t be changed, but the next moment is undecided. What we do now shapes what comes next, and when our actions are rooted in allowing and acknowledging the current reality of things then they’re very much wiser and more effective.

So part of the first step with AIM in this particular family situation is to allow that it is actually what it is. But this isn’t cold and indifferent, because as well as a wisdom side to Allowing, there’s also a compassion side.

Compassion involves being kinder and more accepting towards everyone involved in each situation – yourself and others. In this case, it might mean seeing with care and concern all the unhappiness that your mum and your brother are inflicting on themselves as they act out this familiar drama. And it means being kind and concerned for everyone else involved in the moment, including yourself.

Compassion needs to start with yourself. That often goes against our assumptions about what compassion or kindness is all about. But when we’re better able to be kind to ourselves it can help us be kinder to others.

It’s so easy, and so common, to be harshly self-critical. We can sometimes speak to ourselves in ways we’d never speak to others. ‘Where did I leave my keys? Oh, that’s so stupid! I’ve lost them again. I keep doing that. That’s so stupid. I’m such an idiot!’ If your friend told you she’d lost her keys and you used that kind of language to her, she’d think it very odd.

With Allowing we’re kinder to ourselves. And we’re kinder and more accepting of others. Everyone has their own history that has shaped them to be as they are. We’re all doing our best to make a life and to get by. Yes, some people can annoy us. Some can seem harsh and unkind. But if we really understood what it’s like from their side – what it’s like to be them – maybe we’d be less critical. With Allowing, we ease back a bit on our own harsh and critical judgements – towards ourselves, others and the situations we find ourselves in.

So, in the case of your mum and your brother, you allow the experience, in that moment, to be what it is.

You don’t get angry with yourself for letting the situation get to you. You don’t get angry with the others around the table – that wouldn’t help. And instead of helplessly wishing things were different you’re able to accept that it is what it is. Like it or not, what is happening is happening.

The second part of AIM is Inquiry.

Inquiry involves taking a lively interest in each moment of experience. As you develop your capacity for Inquiry you find yourself occupying an increasingly interesting world. You begin to notice what’s happening inside you, your thoughts, feelings, body sensations and impulses – right now. And you get more interested in what’s happening outside you, in the world around you, right now. You get more interested in other people – what’s going on for them? And you get more interested in what’s happening between you and others – the constantly changing, endlessly fascinating dynamic of humans relating to each other.

With Inquiry, the rich and complex tapestry of this present moment lights up. You become more alive to each moment and begin to see more into the depth of things.

Coming back to the situation at that family gathering, instead of reacting you begin to inquire. You broaden your attention. Rather than being lost in what is happening out there – as if you’re immersed in a TV show, emotionally at the mercy of what happens next – you become interested in your experience. You begin to wonder what the others around the table might be experiencing. You notice things in the space around you that might be influencing what’s happening.

Questions form in your mind: ‘What am I feeling right here and now?’ ‘What do I see in the faces of my family?’ ‘What is the atmosphere in the room right now?’ ‘What am I seeing that can give me a clue about what this strange dynamic is all about?’

You’re open, engaged and interested. Alive to what’s happening. Caring, kind and curious.

And you have Meta-awareness, the third element of AIM.

You are simultaneously ‘in’ your experience, feeling and sensing what’s going on, and at the same time you’re able to notice some of the ways it’s unfolding for you.

You notice and can, to some extent, describe your thoughts, feelings, body sensations and impulses as they arise and pass. The lens of your awareness can be set narrower, focused just on yourself and your inner experience, and it can be set wider. You can pay attention outside yourself – you pick up your relations’ body language and facial expressions. You notice how warm the room is and how the music in the background is quite lively and fun, in contrast to the mood in the room.

Meta-awareness is a way of experiencing that we all have to some extent. And it’s something that we can develop much further. Here’s an example that might help you to understand a little better what we mean by meta-awareness.

If you have ever travelled on the London Underground at rush hour you will be familiar with this experience. You’re standing on a station platform at 5.30 p.m. It’s hot and crowded. It’s been a tough day and you’re feeling frazzled. You can’t wait to get home, take off those shoes, get a drink and relax. A train pulls in. People struggle to get off – there’s hardly any space on the crowded platform – and others rush to get on. Pushed from behind, you just make it. You’re standing there, hot, breathless, squeezed from all sides as the train pulls out. There hardly seems to be room to breathe. You grow increasingly irritated.

‘Oh no. This is intolerable!’ you think. ‘Why am I doing this to myself? People are so inconsiderate! If another person pushes their backpack into my face I swear I’ll scream! In the morning they all stink of aftershave. In the evening it’s body odour. This is ridiculous! It’s completely intolerable …’

And on and on.

That’s one way of being with what’s happening.

Here’s another. You start to grow irritable, but meta-awareness kicks in. You notice that your jaw is tight and that you’re holding your shoulders up so they’re almost alongside your ears. You see that your thoughts and feelings have fallen into ‘unhelpful inner-rant’ mode.

So you ease your jaw, relax your shoulders and come away from the rant. ‘Gosh – I’m having such irritable thoughts!’

In this instance, the difference is between being irritable and noticing that you’re having irritable thoughts and feelings.

That moment of stepping back, ever so slightly, of seeing what you’re up to and what’s going on, is a tiny shift – but it changes everything.

One moment you’re unconsciously ‘doing irritation’ – lost in your inner rant, treating the world as if it were intolerable (it’s not – you do this commute every day, it must be tolerable). The next moment you wake up to what you’re doing and you begin to exercise some choice. You can ease your jaw, relax your shoulders, at least to some extent, and you can stand there and be with the discomfort of the moment knowing that it won’t last for more than a few minutes. Perhaps you recognise that this is part of the price you pay for living in such a vibrant city with so many great opportunities.

Meta-awareness involves waking up to what’s going on with us – with our thoughts, our feelings, our body sensations and impulses – in each moment. When we have that awareness, then we can choose what we do next. When we don’t have it, we’re stuck in the rut of our familiar, habitual reactions.

When Allowing, Inquiry and Meta-awareness come together, in any combination, they open up a space in which we’re able to respond, rather than react, to whatever situation we find ourselves in. Remember, AIM is all about choiceful response rather than choiceless reaction.

AIM lets you sit at that table with your family much more resourcefully. You see what’s going on in a much richer way. That lets you make choices. You can choose to intervene in a skilful, caring way if that seems possible. Or you can choose not to if the opportunity isn’t there. But whatever you do or don’t do, your response comes from a sensitive, kindly and informed choice. AIM is the exact opposite of the unconscious reaction that keeps family dynamics like this endlessly spinning.

It’s important to realise, though, that AIM is not the same as being dispassionate. Just because we don’t get caught up in the familiar patterns of reactivity playing out around us doesn’t mean we don’t feel for what’s going on. It doesn’t mean we don’t care, and it doesn’t make us somehow inert. Quite the opposite. AIM allows us to engage more resourcefully – to act – or not act – with care, kindness and interest, as seems most appropriate. We can respond creatively to what we find, or we can mindlessly react to whatever shows up.

By developing your AIM you can increase your ability to respond creatively. That can make a powerful difference to your life and the lives of those around you.

Learning to AIM doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have more friends, make more money or save the planet – although you never know. But it will make one crucial difference: it will give you more choice. As your ability to choose develops, so you will find that you can begin to act in a more careful and informed way. That will lead to a happier you. In the case of that family gathering, it lets you have a much more productive influence on the people you care about, rather than just putting your head down and losing yourself in watching the drama being acted out around the table – or getting into the script and adding your own unhelpful spin to the reactive dynamic.

In short, you become wiser and kinder.

The important point is that we can all allow and inquire to some extent already. We all have some capacity for meta-awareness. But you can’t simply decide to increase these as if that will come about simply because you want it. You’ve got to do things to train your mind to get better at these activities. There are simple exercises you can do to increase your AIM. That is what the Mind Time practices are all about.

This book and the Mind Time practices help you to AIM better. Our confidence in the practices comes from our work over many years, including a three-year study into the effects that the practices had on an individual’s ability to AIM by using allowing, inquiry and meta-awareness. The findings were published as a report and a series of articles in the Harvard Business Review. (For more about our research see the box below and the section at the end of the book.)

10 MINUTES OF MIND TIME EACH DAY WILL CHANGE YOUR MIND

AIM is a form of mindfulness, which refers to the ability to choose to be aware, in the present moment, of your experience and how it relates to the situation you find yourself in, and to hold that awareness in a compassionate and careful manner. The fundamental building blocks of mindfulness, as we see it, are allowing, inquiry and meta-awareness.

THE 10-MINUTE RULE

The individuals in our research study wished to improve how they performed – as parents, friends and work colleagues. Here are some examples of issues they wanted help with. Which of these resonate with you?

 ‘I want to be a better parent and enjoy my time with my children more’

 ‘I want to be more resilient – better able to cope with work pressure’

 ‘I want to feel like I have more space and time to do other things besides work’

 ‘I want to feel less anxious – and just be in a better mood more of the time’

 ‘I want to sleep better’

 ‘I want to get the most out of my team and help them develop’

 ‘I want to be able to deal with my difficult neighbour/relative/boss better’

 ‘I want to be able to be the best friend and relative I can be’

What we discovered was really interesting.

The people who undertook the training showed some improvements in mindfulness and resilience. But the more Mind Time they put in each day, the more significant change occurred across a variety of areas.

As practice times went up, so too did improvements in resilience, collaboration, agility, perspective taking, aspects of empathy and mindfulness. Their levels of personal distress reduced. They reported an increased capacity for self-awareness and self-management, especially around their ability to regulate emotions, see alternative perspectives and ‘reframe’ potentially difficult or stressful situations both at home and at work.

They also reported enhanced sleep, reduced stress levels and improved work–life balance, as well as increased confidence in the face of difficult situations.

But how much Mind Time was ‘enough’? We observed a simple rule at work.

Those people who had done, on average, 10 minutes or more per day over the eight-week period experienced significantly greater improvements in their levels of mindfulness and resilience than those who practised less than that.

Increasing your AIM can change your mind and change your life. Our research, and experience of teaching thousands of people over many years shows that you can increase your AIM by practising some simple techniques. But, as so often in life, the benefits come with practising these techniques on a regular basis. Just like learning a musical instrument, it turns out that changing our minds takes practice. Daily practice. That’s good news, because it is achievable. And the even better news is that we know how much time we need to devote to that practice to make a real difference.

On our research programmes we found that with less than 10 minutes a day, there is some change, but not much. But at 10 minutes or more per day, changes really start to kick in. This is an important finding.

Think about it. Just 10 minutes – and you begin to change your mind.

To put this into perspective, let’s do the maths.

If you’re currently getting the UK average of around 6.8 hours’ sleep a day (as opposed to the 7.7 hours on average that most of us think we need), that means you’re awake for 17.2 hours each day.1 That’s 1,032 minutes. Ten minutes of Mind Time per day therefore represents less than 1 per cent of your waking hours.

Just under 1 per cent of your time given over to Mind Time and using AIM can significantly improve your life. Moreover, we know from our own experience and from what people tell us, the better you become at working with AIM the more that will improve the lives of those around you too.

Here’s another point. The more practice that participants in our research project did, the more they changed. But significant change started at 10 minutes. If they did less, they didn’t get much change. So we encourage you to get going and to do at least 10 minutes of Mind Time each day. If you can do more, that would be even better. But we found that you’re unlikely to get very much benefit if you do less.

The Mind Time practices we taught them allowed our research participants to experience AIM over and over again. So much so, that it began to be habitual. The three aspects of AIM – allowing, inquiry and meta-awareness – became instinctive.

Let’s take a closer look now at the three elements, so that we can help you to build them with practice.

ALLOWING

Allowing involves approaching a situation with an attitude of openness and kindness to yourself and others. It’s not about being passive or giving up; it is about facing up to what is actually going on in each passing moment and using our energy more productively, rather than wasting it wishing things were other than they are.

Amy is an enthusiastic, but understandably tired, mother of three young children who worked with us for a couple of months to improve her AIM. Absolutely committed to her role as a mother, she wanted to be able to cope with juggling family life with work life, which was also very important to her. She explained allowing like this:

‘It’s that ability to let a few things go more easily, and not worry excessively about them. Take it as what it is. There’s also the deeper recognition that there are things you just can’t change. Then the best option is to go towards them and be with them.’

Without allowing, our criticism of others and ourselves crushes our ability to inquire and observe what is really happening.

Take the case of Matt, a father who came to us for help. We’ve known Matt for a few years and although we met him in the context of his work initially, the most important thing for him is his family and how he can be a ‘good dad’.

Matt’s teenage daughter was getting into trouble at school – and it was getting worse. His levels of anxiety had reached a critical point. Every time she got into trouble, he would fly off the handle. That left him feeling thoroughly ineffective as a dad. He had no idea how to get through to her. He was having trouble sleeping and found himself constantly ruminating over the issue. That began to put his marriage under strain as he and his wife began to blame each other for their daughter’s behaviour.

We saw how Matt’s situation was affecting his work when we observed him during a team meeting. When he stood up to present an update on how his part of the business was doing, his body language and tone of voice gave away how exhausted and anxious he was. He couldn’t meet the eyes of his audience and we saw how he struggled to remember details and answer questions clearly. He stumbled his way through the presentation and left his team awkwardly wondering how to respond.

Talking with Matt afterwards, we asked what had been going through his mind as he stood up to make his presentation.

‘I just knew it wouldn’t go well. I felt so exhausted, so nervous. There was this voice going on in my head – “You’re not going to do well … you’re not going to do well …” so I didn’t. The more I felt it was going badly, the angrier I got with myself. I told myself, “Pull yourself together!” The more I did that, the angrier I got with myself and the tenser I became. The tenser I got, the angrier I got. I kept thinking, “You’re really letting yourself and everyone else down.” I guess it’s no surprise that I did.’

Things were undeniably tough for Matt and it would have been great if he could somehow have been more open with his colleagues and asked them for help. But that’s not always possible in every workplace. What would also have helped, though, would have been if he had been able to hear the voice in his head and react to it with compassion, rather than anger. In Matt’s case, though, on hearing the voice he became angrier and, as a result, heaped even more pressure on himself.

Do you recognise this sort of voice? One of the people attending a course we led described it as the Poison Parrot that sits on your shoulder – whispering undermining words in your ear.

If he’d been able to see in that moment that the thought ‘You’re not going to do well’ was just a thought, not ‘truth’. And then if he could have met that thought with compassion and acceptance – ‘Oh yes, there’s that thought again. It’s just a thought – it’s allowed …’ – then things might have gone differently. He might have been able to regulate his emotional state a little better. That might have given him the opportunity to breathe just a little bit more, to look up a little more, to settle a bit more, and to begin to inquire into what was going on.

That might have made the difference.

INQUIRY

Now let’s look at the second element of AIM.

Richard, a high-flier, is unusually quick thinking and passionate – he can be fun to be around but also breathtakingly energetic. He leads a successful team in a demanding industry. He has a wife and two children, but he doesn’t see them much because of work. He wants results and seems to get them. But he struggles with one key issue. He is so quick to react that the people who work for him are scared of him. They’re unwilling to open their mouths in case he dismisses their ideas or judges them as incapable. The same is true at home – his wife and kids don’t tend to share concerns with him because they think he will offer quick ‘solutions’ and tell them to just get on with it and stop complaining. Listening and empathising are two things Richard is not known for.

Richard is determined to change his behaviour. His marriage and his long-term relationship with his children depend on it. He also believes that for his team at work to function even more effectively, there must be more sharing of ideas, learning from mistakes and more confidence in speaking up.

When we first met Richard, he was aware of his behaviour and the effect it was having but he didn’t know how to stop doing it. Teaching him listening skills, or telling him the benefits of collaboration and empathising – things that he was already well aware of – would make no difference. Coercion, persuasion or teaching: in his case they wouldn’t change anything.

Instead, what we’ve been helping Richard do is to become interested in how he’s behaving now. To focus less on what he is trying to become and, rather, first inquire about how he is.

This may sound paradoxical but if you inquire into your current experience with interest, rather than trying to be something else, you may naturally respond and change it.

If we ask you, right now, what’s your posture like while you read these lines? What position is your spine in at this moment? Which muscles are tight and which are relaxed? While you question and find answers, there’s a good chance that you’ll subtly change your posture in response. This doesn’t come from trying or forcing – or us explaining about good posture and then telling you to do it. It comes from simply noticing. And that noticing doesn’t happen unless you inquire in the first place.

The people we have worked with tell us of the key role inquiry played in their path towards being more vital and alive. They learned to take an interest in their own experience.

Jenny is a nurse. She is compassionate and precisely the sort of person you would want to be responsible for your care if you were in hospital. Always wanting to be even better at her job, she practised her AIM with us over several months. She felt that it was her ability to inquire into her present-moment experience that made the most difference to how she dealt with her patients. As she explained:

‘I ask myself, “Why am I feeling like this? What’s this feeling? What am I sensing?” And I’m interested in it rather than trying to just make it go away.’

Exploring these sorts of questions openly and robustly can be very effective. Simply asking a question and exploring all that follows can lead to change – in and of itself.2 This might be in an individual’s working life or their life outside work. For example, asking someone to consider how and when they speak up well to their boss encourages them to realise how they speak up and how effective their boss is at listening.3 They might go away from that conversation with a better understanding and a deeper commitment to speak up more. Or they may walk away frustrated, as they begin to see how their boss silences them. That might lead to them applying pressure on their boss to change his or her behaviour in the future. Either way, the system is changed.

Asking questions leads to change.

Inquiry is the ignition key – if we’re stimulated to wonder and ask questions, we give ourselves a moment to pause and reflect. If we do not inquire, then we have no impetus to do anything differently or to learn. If we don’t learn, we won’t change.

META-AWARENESS

When we do Mind Time practices, we deliberately (but gently and kindly) bring attention to our present-moment experience. Then our minds wander. Then we notice that wandering and we bring our focus back to our present-moment experience. In this way, we are exercising the parts of our brain involved in observing and describing experience, as well as those involved in focus and attention. In doing so, we build our capacity to do this to a degree that allows us to call these brain networks into action when we need them most in our daily lives.

This sort of awareness is different to simply having a general sense of understanding. The sort of awareness we are talking about is meta-awareness. As we saw earlier, ‘meta’ means ‘beyond’ or ‘at a higher level’. So we are pointing towards a specific type of awareness. It describes a particular way of observing and being able to describe what is happening in the ever-changing stream of your experience from moment to moment.

This can be a tricky idea to grasp, although it will become clearer when you actually try out any of the Mind Time practices.

Sometimes the stream of our experience is calm and steady; sometimes it’s much more turbulent. We can think of it as made up of four elements – our thoughts, feelings, body sensations and impulses. These combine and recombine in all sorts of unpredictable ways.

The stream of our experience – our thoughts, feelings, body sensations and impulses – is always flowing, always changing, from the day we’re born until the day we die. And here’s the point: we can be immersed in that stream – just experiencing. Or, at key times, we can notice the stream. We can see what’s going on with us. In that moment, meta-awareness occurs and something new and subtly powerful enters the picture.

Meta-awareness enables us to choose.

When we are aware of our thoughts, feelings, body sensations or impulses as just that – as just a thought, just a feeling, just a sensation or just an impulse – a new freedom can enter the picture.

We can think of meta-awareness as a wonderful capacity that allows us to do two seemingly contradictory things at once. On the one hand, we’re still in the stream of our experience because we can’t ever leave that stream. So long as we’re alive, we’re experiencing. But meta-awareness allows us at one and the same time to step for a moment onto the bank of the stream and to see it flowing by.

With meta-awareness, we’re both in the stream and ever so slightly apart from it – objectively observing it, noticing what’s going on.

Imagine you are on a tall-masted ship – one with big sails and a crew of 50 hard at work on the deck. You hit a storm. You cling on to the side, unable to move. Meta-awareness is the ability to climb up into the crow’s nest. You are still on the ship – you are intimately aware of how the lurching of the ship makes you feel; you feel the wind rush at your face – you are very much in the experience. But, crucially, you are also ever so slightly distant from it now and able to look down on the rest of the crew, able to see the storm and how it is affecting the ship. You can see the bigger picture.

Peter is a quiet, introverted single father. He took up the Mind Time practices we shared with him partly because he was experiencing quite high levels of anxiety as he tried to manage commitments of work, being a father and also a carer to an elderly parent. For him, it was developing his ability to observe his thoughts rather than be ruled by them that made a crucial difference. He explained:

‘The practices gave me a way to take back control over my own thinking. So recognising that I’m choosing my thoughts, and they’re not me, they’re just the noise of what’s going on.’

To get a more immediate experience of what we’re talking about, try this experiment.

We’ll briefly outline two different scenarios and invite you to reflect on each of them, separately, for a few seconds. If the contents of these scenarios don’t work in your own life, when you’ve read them both maybe take a moment to imagine something that better fits your circumstances.

Scenario 1

You’ve had a dreadful night. At 3 a.m. you woke suddenly with a low-level feeling of anxiety – and that got you thinking. You know that it’s not helpful to pursue thoughts like that at 3 a.m. – they’re always somehow exaggerated – but you couldn’t help yourself. One thought led to another. To top it off, you then started worrying about the fact that you weren’t sleeping and you were going to be tired and significantly below your best for the busy day ahead. So you started to think about that, and that really didn’t help. Having finally dropped off at 5.30, the alarm woke you at 6.30 and you began your morning bleary-eyed and feeling like there was sand under your eyelids.

That morning, you drop the kids off at school and they leave the car without saying a word to you.

What do you think? How do you feel?

Reflect on that for a few seconds before reading Scenario 2.

Scenario 2

You’ve had a great night. One of those really comfortable, satisfying nights when you get to bed at a good time, sleep all the way through and wake having had what feels like the perfect amount of sleep. You feel good.

That morning, you drop the kids off at school and they leave the car without saying a word to you.

What do you think? How do you feel?

Now we have just one question for you. Between Scenario 1 and Scenario 2 – was there any difference?

When we talk about these scenarios we usually find that there are a few people who experience no difference between the two. But there will also be a significant number of people who experience the two scenarios very differently.

‘In the first scenario I was so irritated,’ someone might say. ‘I thought, “Oh yeah – that’s right, I’m just your taxi service …” but in the second scenario I experienced that in another way. “Ah well,” I thought, “teenagers …”.’

It’s exactly the same event – the kids leave the car without speaking – but in one mind state you interpret that one way, in another mind state you have an alternative interpretation.

The way your mind is shaped by the first scenario presents you with a world in which your kids don’t care and treat you like a taxi service. In the second scenario, a differently shaped mind presents you with a world where, hey, your kids are just teenagers with their own preoccupations and, while this behaviour is something you’ll maybe raise with them another time, for now it’s OK. It doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t care.

What’s going on here?

With challenging events we assume that the way we think and feel is caused by that event. ‘Of course I feel irritated. Didn’t you see how they just walked off without acknowledging me?’ But it’s not the event that caused us to react in that way.

In one mind-state we think and feel one way about the event (‘I’m just your taxi service!’); in another mind-state we think and feel differently (‘Ah well – teenagers …’). Not only that. It’s also important to see that the way we think and feel about what happens has further impacts on our mind-state. We get irritated when the kids walk off without saying good-bye and that takes our mind-state a notch or two lower. When we’re in a more positive and resourceful mind-state, and can smile and let go of it, it doesn’t bring us down.

Here’s the point. Sometimes we’re more resourceful; sometimes we’re less. There’s no getting away from that. We’re not about to say that the answer to all our problems is just to be more resourceful more often. But when you can see this process at work – when you can stand back and be aware of your thoughts, feelings, body sensations and impulses as just that – thoughts, feelings, body sensations and impulses, and not as ‘me’ or as ‘reality’ – then you can choose. This is what we call a state of ‘intimate detachment’. This isn’t the kind of detachment that leaves you feeling somehow separate, cold, clinical and not involved in what’s going on. Instead, you’re close to the experience, intimately involved in what’s happening. And at the same time you’re able to stand just a tiny, tiny bit back, so you can see what’s happening as it happens.

The diagram above describes this process.

1 The event – the kids get out of the car at school without saying a word.

2 The mind-state – we’re always in one or another state of mind when anything happens. In the example above, if we didn’t get much sleep we’d be in one kind of mind-state; if we slept well we’d be in another.

3 The interpretation – depending on our state of mind, we immediately form an interpretation of what just happened. When we’re sleep-deprived and struggling with the day we might well interpret that behaviour as fundamentally selfish and uncaring, whereas when we’re feeling well rested and more resourceful we might interpret it more as just what adolescents sometimes inadvertently do.

4 Our thoughts, feelings, body sensations, impulses – depending on the interpretation we make, our experience then unfolds in a particular way. A range of thoughts, feelings, body sensations and impulses to act follow from that interpretation. In scenario 1 we might think, ‘I’m just a taxi service for them!’ That comes with feelings of sadness and a sense of hollowness in the belly and tightness at the jaw. And we might want to cry or go off and get some chocolate. In scenario 2 we might think, ‘Uhuh – that’s adolescence for you.’ That might come along with warm feelings to the kids who are going through puberty; a sense of warmth and openness in the chest area and the resolve to talk about taking others into account when the time is right for that.

Thoughts, feelings, body sensations and impulses. That’s one way of exploring the various components of each moment of experience. Meta-awareness is the capacity to observe these in action and realise they are not set in stone; we do not have to succumb to being driven blindly by them.

KEY MESSAGES IN CHAPTER 1

 We spend most of our life on automatic pilot, being swept along by our stream of experiences, habitually deciding on courses of action according to our programmed reactions.

 If, however, we can develop our AIM – allowing, inquiry and meta-awareness – we have more choice in the actions we take.

 Allowing is about meeting our experience with an attitude of care and acceptance, rather than wishing things were different. Inquiry is about being interested in our experience. Meta-awareness is about being able to be both in our experience and, at the same time, just a little separated from it so that we can observe and describe what is going on.

 Our research tells us that we can hone these capacities in a concentrated way through the Mind Time practices.

 The Mind Time practices we will teach you in this book will enable you to choose how you respond more of the time, rather than simply reacting automatically.

 By giving you more choice in your actions, you are more likely to make informed and careful decisions. That is likely to lead to better lives for you, for those around you, and potentially for the environment and society you live in.

The next chapter will introduce you to these practices so you can learn how to AIM.