Chapter 8
Navigating Troubled Waters – Week Five: Relinquishing Attachments
In This Chapter
Dealing with difficult thoughts
Coming to terms with past experiences
Letting go of attachments
All people face difficult periods from time to time and have events in their past that they need to deal with. The common (and quite understandable response) is often to turn away from and reject the resulting painful thoughts, memories and experiences. But resistance and denial require an enormous amount of effort and in fact such non-acceptance usually creates a whole lot more discomfort than it alleviates.
As an alternative approach, in this chapter I lead you towards cultivating the right atmosphere for accepting and handling adversity. I show you ways in which you can allow yourself to accept difficult thoughts – letting them just be – and only respond to them when doing so seems helpful. I also encourage you to let go of mental attachments (in other words, your habitual thoughts about how life should be, what you deserve and your own expectations of yourself and other people) and develop a radically different relationship with your unwanted life experiences.
Initially, accepting something that hurts or burdens you can be a difficult prospect to engage in. I want to assure you that this chapter isn’t about becoming resigned to your problems, but involves expanding a limited or constricted view about the problems confronting you. Kind and compassionate awareness allows you to consider getting really close to your pain and, by embracing it, perhaps cause it to change or even disappear altogether.
Getting Your Bearings on the Course
If you’re following the eight-week mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) course, this chapter forms week five and begins the second half of the programme, which helps you implement mindfulness more into your daily life. You not only practise new meditations, but also become even more aware of which thinking patterns and behaviours cause you suffering so that you can decide to engage in them less and less often.
To get the most from this chapter, you may want to ensure that you’re up to speed with the following aspects of mindfulness:
Your private meditation space, which I discuss setting up in Chapter 4, is proving suitable for your continuing, regular practice.
You know how your brain develops neuro pathways (see Chapter 7).
You’re aware of the importance of the breath-monitoring exercises (check out Chapters 4 to 6).
You understand that negative automatic thoughts (NATs) cause problems that you can challenge by being mindful (see Chapter 7).
Mindfulness is more about real-life application than meditating formally every so often. It’s about knowing that you have available the possibility of inviting kindness and compassion into every area of your life.
Allowing the Presence of Painful Thoughts, Emotions and Memories
As part of helping to change your relationship to your past experiences, I want to get back to basics with a couple of definitions. You may think that you know what the words pain and suffering mean, and you may even sometimes think that they indicate the same thing, but I use them to mean two quite different aspects of life:
Pain is what you experience directly in your body or mind when life deals you difficult challenges: for example, physical pain from an accident or mental pain from a relationship break-up.
Suffering is created secondarily when you refuse to deal with or accept such negative incidents: for example, pretending that an accident hasn’t happened by taking painkillers without trying to find out what damage really occurred, or pretending that you couldn’t care less that your partner left you. Each denial that you’re in pain feeds into your secondary suffering.
These definitions help to reveal that suffering is an aspect of a difficult life experience that you can hugely reduce by allowing it to exist, at least initially, and then responding to it wisely.
In this section, you discover how to bring this wisdom to bear so that you can sit with the uncomfortable and cope with the unpleasant. Bear this quote in mind:
The overall tenor of mindfulness practice is gentle, appreciative and nurturing. Another way to think of it would be heartfulness.
—Jon Kabat-Zinn
Jon Kabat-Zinn points out that while people find it difficult to treat themselves and others in a heartful way, it is exactly what you’re endeavouring towards through mindful living. Learning about forgiveness and the alleviation of suffering is part of this endeavour.
Staying with discomforting thoughts
You focus on your breath in meditations in Chapters 4 (such as the body scan), 5 (sitting with sounds) and 5 (sensing physical pain). Now I invite you to carry out a similar exercise, but this time look out for anything you may label as ‘uncomfortable’. The idea is for you to move between awareness of the world around you (seeing, hearing, smelling) and awareness of the sensations that this world elicits within you (the effect it has on your body and breath). If you need reminding of my tips for scheduling and conducting your practice time and space, see Chapter 4.
In this exercise, instead of focusing on the general, you now focus on the specific, learning how to use the breathing space to deal with an individual problem or grievance and so mindfully achieving closure and/or progress. When you feel ready, please:
1. Select a discomfort or problem you want to deal with. I recommend that you start with a small irritation rather than a major issue – for example, a little discomfort or disappointment, such as nagging thoughts and feelings about a promise a friend has made but forgotten about. Any larger or more overwhelming problem should be approached with the help of a therapist to protect and guide you.
Your aim here is either to kindly remind your friend to fulfil her promise or to let go of any resentment and do whatever your friend promised yourself.
2. Visualise how your friend completes the task she agreed to handle, or see yourself, without too much effort, getting it done. Closing your eyes may help you to visualise this. Whenever you notice that your awareness is being pulled away from your focus, either by critical or non-related thoughts arising or by discomfort anywhere in your body, briefly focus on those distractions.
Maybe if you’re experiencing negative thoughts, feelings or sensations, you’ll experience a non-accepting response. If, on the other hand, you experience something pleasant, you may want to hold on to it and might develop attachment. Both of these mind-states – the pushing away and the attaching – are the opposite of acceptance. Don’t judge yourself, for this is the human condition. Most untrained minds end up grasping or rejecting, which is where mindfulness practice comes in. It teaches your mind to see what actually is going on moment by moment and sometimes that is all there is to do.
3. Kindly and deliberately bring your awareness back to your intended visualisation. The breath provides a useful vehicle for doing this. Bring friendly awareness to the part of the body in discomfort by breathing into it on the in-breath, and breathing out from it on the out-breath, letting go of any discomfort as much as possible. You can observe and then let go of critical thoughts as if you had a bunch of balloons that you let go up into the sky.
4. When your attention moves to the bodily sensations and you locate what’s pulling at your attention you could simply say to yourself: ‘It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s okay. Let me feel it.’
5. Stay with your awareness of these bodily sensations and/or thoughts and how you relate to them; breathing with them, accepting them, letting them be. Repeat the same words as in Step 4 when necessary. Use each out-breath to soften and open to the sensations you become aware of. For each difficult thought or emotion, say, ‘It’s okay.’
The important insight to gain from this meditation is to become more aware of what is most dominant in your experience right now. So, if you’re constantly lured back to specific thinking patterns, feeling patterns or body sensations, the invitation for you is to bring a gentle and curious awareness to this experience. The easiest method to be with any experience is first of all to simply accept it as it is, just allowing it to be there, rather than trying to change it or fight it.
I’m not encouraging you to try to resolve anything by being with these uncomfortable emotions, but instead ask only that you act like a detective, simply investigating the nature of the discomfort. By turning towards rather than pushing against these thoughts, you may begin to notice a change in your perception.
In the nearby sidebar ‘The Guesthouse’ I discuss a poem by the 12th century mystic and Sufi poet Rumi. It talks about the human condition and puts an unexpected slant on it.
Developing the coping breathing space exercise
In Chapter 6, I describe an emergency breathing space exercise that works as an excellent intervention when you feel that life is overwhelming. However, when you’re in a highly stressful situation, such as having an argument with a co-worker, for example, that exercise may not be enough to enable you to deal with the situation in the most mindful and effective way possible. In such a situation, you can use the following version of the breathing space meditation to cope with the discomfort.
By practicing this version of the breathing space meditation three times daily, you can really get to know it by heart for the eventuality of having to use it as an intervention.
1. Direct your awareness and bring attentiveness to the stressful situation as it presents itself in this moment. Observe with curiosity any inner experiences. Notice thoughts, feelings and body sensations. They are what they are.
2. As best as you can, describe in thoughts and words how this experience feels. For example, ‘I am feeling hot anger arising from my chest, into my face. My face feels red and twisted. I sense that I would like to shout out some swear words.’ See what you experience when you actually name everything (in your mind) as it unfolds.
3. Carefully redirect your focus and attention to the action of breathing. As if you are dissecting this physiological aspect of life, really get in touch with each tiny step that leads to a full breath.
• You may want to use a phrase to help you stay focused on the breath: for example, ‘breathing in’ and ‘breathing out’.
• Notice the little pauses after each in- and out-breath.
• The breath can function as an anchor to bring you into the present and to help you enter a sense of stillness in a short while.
4. Expand your awareness around your whole body. Take special care to direct your breath towards any discomfort, strain or resistance you experience, breathing in to the difficult sensations. On the out-breath you gently soften and remember that this sensation will pass.
As best you can, take away your expanded awareness to where the stressful situation awaits. You have, however, now taken more control of the situation. Maybe your argument can now become a focused conversation where you and your co-worker agree to disagree.
When dealing with such situations, see yourself standing strong, surrounded by a protective see-through bubble. Your bubble is undetectable and protective. You know it exists but whoever is attacking you feels only the sensation of the attack bouncing back and not getting through to you. This helps you to step out of automatic pilot when dealing with difficulties, and to reconnect with the present moment and your own inner wisdom. Practise it so often that you know it by heart without having to think of it.
Tackling Troubling Past Experiences
Maintaining your general focus on the present moment when practising mindfulness is always of paramount importance, particularly when you’re handling difficult memories and emotions connected to past events. Yet when they reside deeply in your whole being, often old patterns or traumas can become unlocked. If an old pain rears its ugly head for you, the best approach is to pull out the root of the problem. I liken it to having a reappearing mouth ulcer and only ever putting cream on it. Although it calms down for a while, sooner rather than later it returns.
Mindful awareness is the key to helping you accept painful past events and to choosing a helpful response (as opposed to an immediate reaction that can be flawed by your wrong interpretations of perceived facts). Perhaps you can think of past incidents where you reacted straight away only to find out that the facts were rather different to your assumptions.
Bringing painful experiences to mind
After you’ve been meditating mindfully for a period of time, and when you feel strong enough, you can make the effort to remember deliberately the pain of a challenging past experience (such as an argument with someone close). Here’s an exercise that helps you to do so and feel safe.
Don’t push yourself too far, too fast at this early stage of your practice and make the experience you use in this exercise one that is extremely painful or traumatic (for example, a memory of sexual abuse). Situations like this would require the presence of an experienced counsellor or MBCT instructor in order to provide you with additional support.
1. Visualise a place or room from your childhood where you always felt safe. Really see it, sense the smells, the feel of furniture or landmarks. Keep breathing mindfully until your mind feels really settled.
2. Picture yourself in the difficult situation or past event. For example, in the school playground where you were bullied, or coming home to a cold house and finding nobody to greet you or cook for you.
3. See this suffering child and bring compassion to the situation. Put your hand over your middle chest (or wherever you feel your emotional heart resides).
4. Allow your adult self or another compassionate person you know or have read about to appear. Let this adult take care of you and say to yourself ‘all will be well at last’ (for more, check out the later section ‘Noticing strong attachments to the past’).
5. Stay with this sense of vulnerability. Remind yourself that it’s supported by your personified compassion.
For techniques on dealing with strong emotions connected to difficult experiences, flip to the later section ‘Coping with strong emotions’.
After several such retreats into your past, you may be able to leave that event or experience behind for good.
Seeing your past as the midnight movie
If you try to bring up painful memories (such as by engaging in the practice in the preceding section) you may discover just how hard it can be. The reason is that you probably spent a lot of time trying to suppress them, and undoing perhaps years of such effort requires time. But remember the well-known saying again: ‘what you resist persists!’
Unless you deal with the memories so that your brain can store them away as completed ‘files’ (‘this was nasty, it happened and now it’s over’), they often continue to affect you and your outlook on life. They need to be confronted, which requires a lot of bravery on your part.
Here’s a method that makes dealing with painful recollections easier – watching the experience on an imaginary television screen. Kindly consider the following:
1. Ground yourself by feeling deeply connected to the earth and keep breathing calmly.
2. See yourself putting on a DVD of the painful memory, sitting down and then observing the drama.
3. Feel the fear, the hurt and the loneliness, but also understand that it truly happened and that you’re here to prove you survived it.
4. Watch the film several times in your mind and then add compassion and awareness to the story you see on the screen.
5. Write the story down in a letter after your meditation, telling the tale and voicing the disappointment towards those who caused your suffering.
6. Burn the letter (safely, perhaps in an iron bucket outdoors) when you feel the process is complete, and also visualise the DVD breaking into tiny little pieces that are carried away by the wind.
Letting go of past events is vitally important. Even so, you may find that you always have a tender spot, like a mental scar, that you have to adjust to living with. Everybody has such scars; again, it’s part and parcel of being human.
Pre-empting future events
Like all human beings, your past experiences condition how you see the future. A highly human response is to pre-empt future events by basing them on your experiences in the past – prejudice in this sense is a survival tool for lots of creatures. Human beings, however, can learn and understand much more deeply than other species, and so you have the option and ability to acknowledge this tendency to prejudice and choose to keep your mind open.
Ask yourself what kind of things you avoid because you assume you know how things are going to pan out. Could you be wrong? Is more than one outcome possible? How can you find out how to leave yourself open to new possibilities?
As so often with mindfulness, the answer is being in the ever-newness of the present moment. Change can and does occur, and you need to persuade yourself to try something anew that caused you pain in the past. So if you tend to abstain from engaging in certain experiences because they may cause another disappointment, free yourself from these shackled beliefs by starting afresh moment by moment. If you do, at least you stand a chance of having a new experience. Try something once and see what unfolds because every moment is a new possibility! Otherwise, you may slip back into a life that’s merely an existence rather than an adventure.
I remember hating tomatoes as a child, mainly because my mother did too. When I was 19 years old, I went on a holiday to Greece and ordered a typical Greek salad. It contained these huge slices of tomatoes and they smelled heavenly. I took a chance and a bite and was in heaven. I never looked back.
Perhaps you too remember disliking something in the past that you now love or used to shy away from doing something that today you feel a strong pull to engage in.
Consider engaging in an activity that causes you only mild anxiety or worry and involve ten other people in the project (this is called a behavioural experiment). The project can be discovering a new skill, or revisiting an old one that teachers or parents told you that you were no good at. Just do it mindfully, without a specific outcome in mind, moment by moment, whether your project is singing in public on a street corner (joined by your co-researchers), going to a painting or language class, or trying to learn to swim. Be the best you can, in the moment, letting your arising thoughts of the past just flow past, like birds in the sky.
Think about how you experience this experiment and then ask all your co-researchers about their ‘story’. You probably find that a whole bunch of different tales come to light. Although you were together experiencing the exact same moment, your personal interpretations and expectations create a number of different accounts. Of course, make sure that you write it all down in your mindfulness diary (which I describe in Chapter 4) so that you don’t forget or later focus just on the negative.
Coping with strong emotions
Past experiences often bring up very strong emotions that can be difficult to deal with. Whatever emotions you identify with yourself when you think of past events, here’s a list of techniques that you may want to try for letting go/dealing with them:
Ride the difficult emotion as if surfing on a big wave: It reaches a peak and then slowly ebbs away; use mindful breathing and observe it with interest and curiosity.
Allow yourself to fully feel the emotion but not act on it: Go right into sensing and describing it; for example, ‘this anger feels hot, looks bright orange, makes my body temperature go up, causes my breathing to speed up’. Take a scientist’s curious perspective, observing the difficult event and staying with it as best as you can.
Look behind the emotion: Ask, what’s the source of it? Are you copying your mother’s hysteria, are you trying to be the opposite of your brother? What feeds this emotion? What if you turn off the tap?
Search for the opposite of the emotion: What’s the other side of this coin? Is fear behind your rearing anger, which often looks more impressive than shaking and crying?
Sit with it: See what happens if you just breathe and be with the difficult emotion.
Resisting the urge to fight or run away
Just as most animals share the instinctive fight-or-flight response to physical threats, you can respond similarly to memories of traumatic past experiences. When things get too rough, you may want to escape and run back to your place of stubborn ignorance.
But in your meditation practice, try your best to stay present rather than regress. You’re to be congratulated for having reached this point of dealing with your past, and turning away now would be a shame.
Return to a mindful, observant, non-judgemental place whenever you feel yourself getting too emotionally heightened. Breathe gently and steadily, and ground yourself by feeling your feet deeply rooted on the surface they’re resting or standing on.
The objective of this practice is to move away from the thinking mind, which is ruminating around ‘attack’ and ‘fear’ thoughts. When you feel ready, kindly close your eyes or maintain a soft focus (half-closed):
1. Bring your awareness to your left foot. You’re not looking at your foot but gently bringing awareness to it. Really feel your foot and slowly guide yourself through the terrain of your foot gently and with kind attention. You can use words like this: ‘I’m becoming aware of my left foot, my big toe, my little toe and all the toes in between, even the spaces between the toes, feeling them, sensing them or just knowing that they’re present. Now I’m bringing awareness to the tips of my toes and to my toe nails, to the heel of my foot, the instep and the front part and now the whole sole of my foot.’
2. Continue bringing attentiveness to your foot as a whole. Include all the little bones, tendons, blood vessels and finally even the skin covering your foot.
3. Spend a couple of minutes on your foot in this mindful way. Doing so directs your conscious thinking away from the beliefs that had been feeding your anger. This meditation may be enough, or you can calm your mind further by carrying out a sound meditation (from Chapter 5) or going for a mindful stroll (check out Chapter 6).
Maintaining a gentle approach
Discovering how to deal with difficult experiences is an important skill. But don’t torture yourself – trying to work out how you may have done things differently before you knew how to be mindful isn’t helpful. Now that you’re integrating this new way of living, you can be ready to do everything with more awareness and consequently with less harm towards others. The past is history and the future yet unknown – the present is the gift!
If you feel the need to make amends, do so with gentle awareness and compassion, letting go of guilt and all the while being conscious of how unaware you were before. Gently let go of old unhelpful habits and be compassionate towards yourself as much as towards other people.
Consider trying the following meditation of strength and gentleness and feel for yourself how it affects your wellbeing:
1. Picture the most beautiful mountain you know or can imagine. Notice its overall shape, the tall peak, the base rooted in the rock of the earth’s crust, the slanting sides. Note how massive the mountain is, how unmoving, how beautiful.
2. See whether you can bring the mountain into your own body. Your head becomes the lofty peak, your shoulders and arms the sides of the mountain, your buttocks and legs the solid base rooted to your cushion on the floor or to your chair.
3. Become the breathing mountain, unwavering in your stillness, completely what you are. Beyond words and thought, you’re a centred, rooted, unmoving presence.
4. As the light changes, as night follows day and day night, the mountain just sits, simply being itself. It remains still as the seasons flow into one another and as the weather changes moment by moment. Storms may come, but still the mountain sits.
5. Imagine the mountain in spring time. See the blue sky, with scattered clouds and the warm rays of the sun shining down. Imagine nature in spring: soft green leaves, multi-coloured buds, birds and the first sign of insects scattering through nature, earth and air. The mountain remains – still and abiding.
6. Imagine a rich summer’s night. Full moon; the sounds of crickets, frogs, toads and an owl; rich fragrance of roses and other blooms lies heavily in the air; a gentle breeze touches the bushes; leaves in the trees and the grass. The mountain remains – still and abiding.
7. Create a rainy autumn day in your mind, if you want to. Heavy clouds, opening heavens, multi-coloured leaves scattered around; imagine the soundscape; hear the strong gusts of wind. The mountain remains – still and abiding.
8. Visualise the mountain in winter. Snowflakes are slowly covering the empty trees and also the slopes of the mountain – still, calmness, white serenity.
9. See the change in all the seasons. Among all this change, the mountain abides, stillness within.
You may want to ask yourself how to translate the story of the mountain into your own life. You may of course have your own ideas and please feel free to add or reject images and aspects of this meditation. Your mountain may have a rounded, soft peak. You may want to see it morning, lunchtime and night. Be creative and feel free.
For me, the message is this: whatever life presents, with its beauty and challenges, deep inside people can remain calm and grounded. Of course, remaining so requires practice and continuity.
Serenity is not freedom from the storm but peace within the storm. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beginning a new relationship with your experiences
Mindfulness isn’t telling you to forget about your past experiences altogether, which would be impossible. You do however want to find novel ways of living or dealing with difficulties in the now. I encourage you to change the way you treat your experiences by changing the relationship you have with them. You become aware of them as thoughts or sensations and start to experience life around them, rather than having them controlling every moment of your life.
Here are a number of possibilities, to which you can add your own personal ones that you want to turn around. (Remember: all the while, ground yourself and be aware of your breathing and of using mindful speech – that is, using only those words that are essential for clarifying what you want to convey, not being overly abrupt or rude but also not skirting around the issue. See Chapter 11 for more about communicating mindfully.)
When you’re invited to a big gathering or party, which you’d have avoided in the past, try a new approach. Tell the host that you may pop in for a short while. Really mean it. Give yourself the opportunity to create a new option in your list of behaviours. Remember, if you really don’t like it, you can still leave after a short stay.
When annoying telephone sales calls come through, you may want to try and say something compassionate to the person who’s on the receiving end. ‘I’m sorry, I really don’t like this type of call. I’m also sorry you have to do this job. I send you kind thoughts.’ And after saying goodbye, hang up. Yours may be the only friendly response the person who phoned you heard all day.
When somebody makes a mistake at work, draw it to their attention but all the while remember that everyone makes mistakes. Think of a kind way to point it out and finish the conversation with praise if at all possible. Use mindful language.
Now write down a list of behaviours and experiences you’d like to change. Perhaps one a week is doable.
Using storytelling to understand suffering
Storytelling is a good way of seeing how your past experiences can be useful in understanding how you attach to or reject opportunities. Without adding mindful consideration to the experience, you may unwittingly undo the joy of an experience.
After reading the story that follows about the blue balloon, kindly sit down for a meditation. See the story unfold in your inner eye. Notice the main characters and see what they could have done differently in order to find out how to be less superficial, more caring and less attached.
After doing this meditation, return to mindful breathing and see whether one of your own stories arises in your memory. If so, what’s it trying to tell you and why does it remind you of the blue balloon story? Would you do anything differently by adding a small dose of awareness if you experience a similar situation again?
‘I want to have a blue balloon! A blue balloon is what I want!’ ‘Here you go Rose!’ Someone had explained to her that the balloon contained certain gases, lighter than air and because of this it floats. ‘I want to let it go,’ she simply said.
‘Don’t you want to give it to the poor little girl over there?’ ‘No, I want to let it go!’ She lets it go, watching it rise into the blue sky. ‘Don’t you regret not giving it to the poor little girl over there?’ ‘Yes, I’d have rather given it to the poor little girl!’ ‘Here you are, give her this blue balloon!’ ‘No, I want to let this one go as well . . . see it fly up into the blue sky!’ She simply lets it go. Then she’s given a third blue balloon. She goes to the poor little girl of her own accord, gives her the balloon and says: ‘Now let it go!’ ‘No’, says the poor little girl looking excitedly at the balloon.
In her room back home it flew up to the ceiling where it remained for three days; it then changed colour, became darker, smaller and finally dropped dead to the floor like a little black sack. The poor little girl thought to herself: ‘I should have let it go outside in the garden, up into the blue sky, I could have watched it fly away, watched it and watched it. . .’
The rich little girl was given loads more balloons and even 30 balloons all at once. She let 20 fly up into the sky and gave the remaining 10 to poor children. And from this moment onwards she was never interested in balloons anymore. ‘Those silly balloons. . .’ she tended to say.
So Aunt Ida suggested that she was really advanced for her age.
The poor little girl however dreamed: ‘I should have let it go, rise up into the blue sky, I would have watched it and watched it. . . ’.
Peter Altenberg, 1910. Translation by Patrizia Collard
This story can be interpreted in a number of ways. Are you focusing on the poor girl, feeling sorry for her and her narrow grasping view that ends in disappointment, or are you more interested in the phenomenon of affluence as portrayed by the rich little girl? Perhaps letting something go is much easier when you’re experiencing life in abundance? What can you discover from the two children who are painted at the extreme end of the behaviour spectrum? Any idea where you’d place yourself? Are poor people necessarily holding back and the rich definitely generous? Most importantly, what can you take away as an insight for yourself from this story?
Unchaining Yourself from Attachments
In this context an attachment is anything that has you so strongly in its grip that you can’t be without it even for a few hours, and which leads to suffering when it’s absent from your life. Attachments, which can include holding onto good, pleasurable things, can lead to huge amounts of suffering if you must have them and can’t be without them. An attachment can be the proverbial first cup of tea in the morning, having your dinner at a precise time every day or needing to watch the TV news every evening. Of course, attachments can also be memories of traumatic part events, toxic relationships or current addictions.
The idea isn’t that you shouldn’t allow yourself to like or love things or other people, but that you don’t try to hold onto and possess those things and instead add a certain amount of spaciousness and flow. This involves not holding on to something to the point where it is crushed or suffocated, and accepting that things must be allowed to change; that life is constantly flowing. All good things end sometime, even if they return again later. So fully enjoy what is, being mindful not to hold on so tightly and perhaps squashing the good thing in the process.
This advice even refers to your meditation practice itself. When you’ve been meditating for a while, you may well have experienced some lovely or even perfect meditations: stillness resided within you and you had no care in the world. But you can’t rely on meditation being so perfect and may miss it when a meditation goes differently. Each meditation is unique and each moment in it is unique, so continue to practise moment by moment dealing with whatever comes up.
People are often unable to let go of attachments and negative thoughts because of self-imposed labels (which have often been previously imposed upon them by others). But how can you expect to overcome an addiction if you never allow yourself to let it go? You aren’t a ‘fluic’ if you have a cold! The same logic applies to all other aspects of your life. No attachment defines you as a whole and thus your whole human experience. Please try to remember this fact because it requires a certain discipline.
Watch out when you label yourself in these ways, even if it only happens in an inner dialogue.
Noticing strong attachments to the past
Observing what strong attachments you may consciously have to past experiences is important because they can chain you to that past. Perhaps you were bullied at school, abused in some way by trusted people, or experienced a great loss or upheaval in your life? If so, ask yourself gently how you cope (or fail to cope) with these memories and examine the ways in which they affect you today. Be specific about the details and the emotions you experience in a detached, non-judgemental way. You can experiment with letting go by revisiting the actual event during a meditation and processing it by picturing a compassionate person standing by you.
Perhaps see yourself with a strong martial-arts master walking through your old school playground and all your former bullies looking down in shame and feeling sorry for what they did to you. Or maybe imagine being back at home and telling your neglectful parents how sad you feel about their actions, but that you’re trying to be compassionate because surely they didn’t know any better.
Although your aim is always to find your own personal path to a healthier lifestyle through MBCT, occasionally challenges may arise where you possibly feel that you require extra assistance. If the root problem is so big that you sense you can’t deal with it alone, please seek advice from a mental health professional, whom you might find through your GP or by searching the Internet for an accredited psychotherapist local to you. Many now offer psychotherapy, coaching or counselling together with mindfulness applications. Never be too proud to ask for help.
Co-existing with aversion
When you’ve a strong attachment to something and you don’t get it, you can react with aversion. Aversion is an experience that you find hugely upsetting and that creates a sense of disgust and repulsion. It seems to originate in the instinct to survive by avoiding contracting a disease or procreating unhealthy offspring. Sometimes, however, aversion can occur due to the brain misinterpreting or overreacting to a perceived threat.
If you’re attached to a certain form of ‘correct’ behaviour, perhaps you perceive somebody you love deeply repulsive when she’s drunk or unwashed; or you’ve a strong aversion to street dwellers, certain animals or foods, or other behaviours.
Aversion is a form of experiencing fear or anxiety, which expresses itself by pushing something away and hiding from it. But if you experience this emotion in one of this chapter’s meditations, return repeatedly to your breathing and stay with it for a while, giving yourself the opportunity to ask whether your reaction is appropriate or misguided. The sidebar ‘Discovering how to love again’ shows that you can overcome misplaced aversion, but you don’t need a big misfortune to feel aversion. Much smaller triggers can cause a similar reaction. For example, many older people find ageing itself repulsive and can’t cope with the changes in their looks and abilities due to the passage of time.
Perhaps explore whether you feel aversion towards an aspect of yourself or others that your heart would prefer to accept. Consider whether your feelings originate in an attachment to, say, your youth or former health.
Understanding the importance of acceptance
Unless you discover how to let go of attachments and accept all of yourself – past and present, good and less good, the beauty and the beast! – you’re going to struggle with life and other people. The human condition is one of imperfection, of ongoing change and challenge. Without gently moving towards accepting the whole lot, the light and the dark, you can never reside in a mental place of equanimity and peace. All your experiences, and the little or big scars they leave behind, shape who you are and so have all been important to some extent.
Acceptance of what is, rather than what you’d ideally want, is one of the biggest challenges and liberations you can discover through practicing MBCT. You benefit greatly from seeing that nobody and nothing is perfect and everything that people judge is dependent on the eye of the beholder. You can move towards peace if you can embrace this fact.
Letting go of the desire for quick fixes
This book contains enough stories, poems and real-life examples to help you see that quick fixes rarely offer the best solution. Also, if you’re attached to dealing with your problems in a certain way that doesn’t shift them, perhaps you need to give a new response a chance.
Every moment can be a new experience and open the gateway to change. If this is life – your life – you’re best off being the owner of it all. Therefore, engage with any experience as fully as possible, and remember that not everything is what it seems: certain occurrences involve pain and exhaustion and yet lead to new joys and insights.
Jettisoning pleasant attachments too
Although the exercises in this section mostly relate to resolving unpleasant or difficult experiences, letting go of intense attachments to pleasant experiences is just as important.
You may be surprised by this statement and so here’s an example. Imagine that you eat the most delicious ice cream while on holiday in Venice. It’s simply divine and you go back to the ice-cream shop within an hour to purchase another delicious feast. The next day, you return to your home country. Alas no more ice cream of this kind until, if ever, you return to Venice. And even if you did, would you find that little store again that was in one of the hundreds of ‘stradas’ somewhere in Venice? So you may never have that ice cream again. Never ever.
After a while of ruminating on this lost experience, you may not even be able to remember the joy you had because the whole incident becomes tainted by a sense of loss.
Living in the moment really means just that: fully experiencing, without guilt or attachment, what life offers. And then, on purpose, moving on to the next point in your life’s journey.
Reviewing Your Accomplishments This Week
At the end of week five of the MBCT course, please consider the following questions to take stock of your progress:
How are you getting on with letting difficult thoughts and memories just be (as I describe in the earlier ‘Allowing the Presence of Painful Thoughts, Emotions and Memories’ section)? Don’t worry if you’re finding it awkward; give yourself time to become accustomed to what can be a discomfiting experience.
Can you detect an improved relationship with difficult events in your life after using the exercises in ‘Tackling Troubling Past Experiences’ earlier in this chapter?
Are you continuing to work on disengaging yourself from all attachments, including pleasant ones, as per the preceding section?
The Eastern mindfulness meditation masters spend a lifetime practicing this, so don’t be too hard on yourself after just one week!