PART 1
CHAPTER 1
Which of the following makes you happiest: being distracted by pleasant imaginings, being distracted by neutral imaginings, being distracted by unpleasant imaginings or paying attention to what you are doing? Well, according to a recent study from Harvard University, simply paying attention to what we are doing makes us happiest.[1] This might seem strange because mostly we think that our daydreams, especially the happy ones, are interesting and the source of much of our contentment. Perhaps by the end of this chapter the relationship between our attention and our happiness will make a lot more sense. This book is simply about paying attention—in other words, mindfulness—and the profound happiness and health benefits that this can give us.
Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten why you went there? Have you ever waited for the weather report and when the forecast is given not even hear what the weatherperson says? Have you ever driven your car somewhere and not remembered the journey? Do you ever find yourself in a conversation with somebody and then suddenly wake up to the fact that you are not taking in a word of what they are saying? Do you ever find yourself reading a book (not this one, we hope!) and realising halfway through the chapter that you haven’t taken in a word? Well, if you answered yes to any of these questions, then you know something about what it means to be unmindful.
Our tendency to not be fully present in our life as it happens has vast implications and can result in our missing out on our full life potential. Being unmindful means wasting our lifetime, missing important information, increasing our risk of physical and social accidents and communicating more superficially with other people. Importantly, it makes us unhappier than we realise and more vulnerable to stress and poor mental health and all of the harmful physical consequences that can follow. We will discuss this in more detail later.
Whether unmindfulness is more common today than it once was is hard to say, but mostly these days we find ourselves rushing, rushing, rushing from cradle to grave without ever really appreciating the bit in the middle. If we are not distracted by speeding through life then we might find ourselves distracted by boredom and inertia. Whether it is too fast or too slow, modern life just doesn’t seem balanced. Looking at the pace of our modern life and its constant bombardment of information and disinformation, it would be reasonable to conclude that we have created a world that almost encourages the problem.
Although it often seems that our unmindful and unhelpful mental state is our only choice, it isn’t. Being mindful rather than mindless is literally so simple that a child could do it, and they frequently do practise mindfulness, often better and more easily than adults do. When was the last time that a young child told you, with a frown, that he or she was far too busy worrying about what interest rates will be like when they grow up to go outside in the sun and play ball with you? Mindfulness is our natural state. The rewards of improving our mindfulness are great, but this requires effort and patience—even though the process is so natural that it could accurately be described as effortless effort.
What is mindfulness? Perhaps the simplest way to describe it is to say that mindfulness is the practice of paying attention: knowing where our attention is and being able to choose where to direct it. A slightly more technical definition would be ‘attention training’ or ‘attention regulation’. After all, we accept that physical training is vital for a healthy body, so why not accept that mental training is just as important for a healthy mind and life? We could even say that mindfulness is a practice that teaches us how to simply be ourselves, without having to be in some other place or time—or to be something else or somebody else other than what and who we are. The great American psychotherapist Carl Rogers, after many years of patiently listening to his clients tell him their problems, said that actually there is only one problem: to not know who you are. Mindfulness can give us back what we might think we have lost—ourselves.
Mindfulness is a form of meditation that has been widely practised for millennia, although interest in it and research on it and its clinical and daily life applications has increased enormously in recent years. This is an overnight lifestyle and clinical sensation that is thousands of years old. What do different meditation practices have in common, and what can they offer us? Formal meditation practices involve mental training that improves our ability to regulate our attention, so we don’t get distracted by what makes us unhappy. The multitude of meditation practices available to us vary in the focus of attention they use and in what appears to be their aim, but actually they all aim to develop our capacity to focus attention on something specific.
Our body can be a very useful focus of our attention because, conveniently, it is handily available and is always in the present moment, never in the past or the future. Our body communicates with its outside world through its senses, and so in mindfulness practice our attention is naturally grounded in the present moment if we simply tune in to our senses—if we simply come to our senses. This will free our mind from its distracted preoccupation with a past that is already gone and a future that has never happened. This will allow us to richly experience what is going on in our life right now because we are actually paying attention to it. For example, in this state of full awareness of what is happening to us, right now, right here, we taste our food more, we connect more with our children, we work more efficiently and enjoyably, and we drive more safely. The cost of not paying attention may not be obvious unless we start to look closely at what is going on in our mind, and in our life.
We can use any of our senses to help us focus on the present moment. We recognise the importance of being connected in this way in our everyday language when we say we will ‘be in touch’ or we have ‘come to our senses’ or even we will ‘wake up to ourselves’. If we are acting in such a way that shows that we are out of touch with present-moment reality we often describe this as being ‘out of touch’ or ‘senseless’.
There are other forms of meditation that use a focus of attention other than our body, such as a mental image (imagery), a short mental statement of belief or aspiration (affirmation), a sense of stillness (stillness meditation) or a mantra, and these can all help us achieve peace, relaxation, a sense of connectedness, inner stillness or silence, insight, self-knowledge, better health, improved performance and, in a religious context, oneness with God or Self. Many people would also describe repetitive prayer as a form of affirmation or mantra meditation. What all forms of meditation have in common is that they can make us calmer and happier by helping us focus on what is rather than be distracted by what isn’t.
The state of deep mindfulness could be described as a state of utter simplicity and naturalness. As in the old adage, ‘When a wise man walks he just walks; when he sits he just sits; and there’s nothing else going on.’ Does this sound appealing? Does it sound good to just do what you are doing—whether it’s working or playing—and not worry about anything else? Even focusing on a problem or a question in a mindful way is very different to worrying about it. One option is a grounded present-moment activity and the other involves aimlessly projecting into a future that has not happened but we imagine as real.
We will look at why being able to pay attention is so vital to our happiness and health in more detail in the remainder of this introduction and then in later chapters, where we will apply mindfulness to particular situations such as mental health problems, improving work and life performance, and managing symptoms and improving physical health. Mindfulness is like a multifaceted diamond that looks different depending on which facet you reflect.
We don’t need a particular connection to a particular religion or wisdom tradition—by wisdom tradition we mean any knowledge system that can help us live our lives more peacefully and happily—to benefit from mindfulness, but knowing something about how it emerged from these traditions can deepen our understanding of it. Looking briefly at the historical context of mindfulness’s modern popularity helps us understand what it is and how it can help.
We might think that mindfulness emerged from Eastern traditions, but actually the West also has a rich contemplative or mind-stilling history, even though for many centuries it has lost touch with these roots. Ancient Greeks including Pythagoras, Plato and Socrates wrote about it; and the Jewish, Christian and Sufi traditions also had their own contemplative practices. Maybe the West lost its contemplative roots when it started exploring and conquering our outer world, rather than exploring and making peace with our inner world. Maybe we have been so preoccupied with activity and busyness in the West, and increasingly in the East as well, that we are now mostly ‘human doings’ rather than ‘human beings’.
The pursuit of material–external things as if they can provide deep and lasting happiness is contributing to a dwindling of real meaning and is a factor contributing to an increase in mental health problems. It just isn’t possible to fill the hole inside us by piling up the things outside us. Until recent times there was possibly less disconnection between the inner and outer life in the East than in the West. Indigenous cultures too had their practices that deeply connected themselves to their world, not just through activity but through stillness.
The modern renaissance of interest in meditation and how it can help us—right here, right now—started with some cultural cross-pollination between East and West in the nineteenth century. While the West gave the East new technologies and vast potential for economic development, the East gave the West important philosophies such as those contained in ancient Indian Vedic philosophical texts like the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita, and in practices like yoga and meditation that were based upon them. Thousands of years ago Buddhism grew out of the Vedic tradition and gave us philosophies that helped us to accept reality with greater equanimity, and meditation practices that are now commonly used by ‘modern’ Western psychotherapies such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). For something to be almost universally explored and practised by so many cultures suggests that there is something very universal and important about it.
Eastern philosophy influenced many great writers and philosophers in the West including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hermann Hesse and the Transcendentalists. William James, generally considered to be the father of modern psychology, was profoundly interested in spiritual experiences, clearly seeing that being able to train and direct our attention is vital to our optimal functioning and happiness:
Although the West recognised the great importance of training our attention, the mind-stilling practices that help this happen weren’t widely known until the late twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, however, Carl Jung was also interested in the connections between psychology and spirituality. In science, too, the great physicists of the early and mid twentieth century including Einstein, Schopenhauer, Schrodinger and Pauli were as interested in the powerfully practical Eastern philosophical texts and principles as they were in physics.
Meditation was and is the key to bridging the philosophy of peace and happiness and the experience of peace and happiness. This practice was first popularised in the West in the late 1950s when the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi introduced Transcendental Meditation, a form of mantra meditation, to California. Pictures of the Beatles sitting at the feet of their teacher deeply etched the notion in the 1960s that mediation was ‘cool’ into a younger generation that craved deep life meaning and was keen to challenge accepted dogma. In the following decade the first scientific research on the new and cool ancient meditation phenomenon was performed by Dr Herbert Benson at Harvard University. Our stress response had previously been described by Dr Hans Selye, who started his stress research in 1936, published The Stress of Life in 1956, and coined the term ‘stress’. Benson realised that meditation produced the opposite of the stress response and coined his famous term ‘The Relaxation Response’ in his popular book on the topic.[3]
Despite promising early findings, meditation wasn’t widely taken up as a foundation for psychotherapy until the 1990s, although a wider field of science called mind–body medicine and its main offspring, Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), has grown steadily in popularity over the past 40 years. Our increasing understanding of the mind–body relationship has certainly provided a useful way of explaining mindfulness. The increasing interest in mind–body medicine shown by those working in traditional Western medicine has paved the way for the past 10–20 years of explosive growth in interest in meditation more generally, and mindfulness in particular. It could even be said that you can’t truly understand the relationship between mind and body without also understanding the role of consciousness—attention. The increasingly impressive scientific research into practices like mindfulness has moved them into mainstream modern culture and healthcare and out of their association with 1960s hippy culture, and before that with the Buddhist-influenced ‘beat’ generation of the 1950s. What Western medicine really needs now is to develop its explanation of the mind–body relationship into an explanation of the consciousness–mind–body relationship.
The vital ingredients of mindfulness are found in all the world’s great wisdom traditions and cultures. There’s nothing particularly Eastern, or Western, about being aware of the present moment, or the simple act of breathing, or paying attention, or being able to objectively stand back from your thoughts and experiences; these experiences are universal. Each culture and indeed each individual eventually discovers this and describes it in their own way. Mindfulness practitioners who came from the Buddhist tradition such as the Dalai Lama and Matthieu Ricard, and the mindfulness repopularising pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn, have made an enormous contribution to the modern application of and research into mindfulness, but even they wouldn’t say that you need to be Buddhist in order to live mindfully. Mindfulness is becoming increasingly widely known in popular culture through modern–ancient classics such as Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now.[4] The principles of mindfulness are in the public domain and readily available to you right now, right here.
The barriers between philosophy, religion, science and popular knowledge are now being broken down as more and more researchers and psychologists are inspired to explore mindfulness at a whole new level. This research can increasingly help ordinary people greatly improve their lives by understanding what it is to be mindful and how this can help reduce unhappiness and even a range of life-threatening conditions. We will discuss this later in this book.
John Teasdale, Mark Williams and Zindal Segal, for example, took Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and developed what they call Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for managing depression—with outstanding results. Davidson, Lasar and others have been inspired and encouraged by the Dalai Lama to scientifically investigate the neuroscience of the contemplative—mind-stilling arts—to study the brain. The fruits of their work are showcased in the Mind and Life Institute, which now hosts dialogues in many of the world’s most respected educational and research institutions.[5] Norman Doidge’s book The Brain that Changes Itself is a fascinating introduction for anyone who would like to understand neuroplasticity, that is, how the brain works and adapts itself depending on our environment and how we think and act.[6]
The mindfulness genie is now well and truly out of its bottle.