A Practical Guide to Mindfulness (Tessa Watt)

The practice of mindfulness goes back thousands of years. Many spiritual traditions have encouraged presence in the moment as a way to be in touch with our inner selves, or the divine. Buddhism has made mindfulness a core part of its teachings, more so than any other tradition. Buddhist thinkers have taken great interest over the centuries in the way the human mind works, developing methods of training the mind to be more present, focused and aware. The practical techniques used in current mindfulness training come largely from the Buddhist tradition of meditation, along with elements drawn from the more body-oriented Indian discipline of hatha yoga. Since the 1960s, the political situation in Asian countries like Vietnam and Tibet has sent Buddhist teachers into exile in the West, where they’ve taken up the challenge of teaching new audiences. Meditation practices which were traditionally done by monks in a forest or monastery have been adapted for busy Westerners with jobs and families. Influential Buddhist teachers have included the Japanese Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, the visionary Tibetan Chögyam Trungpa, and of course the well known Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibet.

The kind of meditation we use in mindfulness training is not about going off into altered states, trying to get to some better place. It’s not about sitting in the lotus position in flowing white robes on a turquoise beach, as the advertising posters would have it – pleasant though that might be! You’re not even trying to get calm and relaxed, or to become a ‘better person’. You are befriending the person you already are, and the place where you are sitting, right now. If you do experience any sense of calm, it is not from stilling the stormy weather of life, but from learning to ride its chaotic energy.

Mindfulness is about experience, not just words and concepts. To get the most from this book, you’ll need to do more than read – you’ll need to actually do the practices. Take your time. See if you can resist the urge to rush through to the end and ‘get somewhere’ quickly. It’s better to do the practices thoroughly, and repeat them a number of times, than to think you are ‘advancing’ by ticking off lots of different exercises.

If you’re prone to depression, you probably have a tendency to ‘ruminate’ – to get caught up in spirals of obsessive thoughts which are hard to distinguish from facts. Through mindfulness you can learn to stay grounded in the body and to be less caught up in the mind. You can start to see that your thoughts are not reality, and take a step back from them. You can learn to see the early warning signs that a spiral of low mood is starting, and so have a chance of taking a different direction. The best time to take up mindfulness is not when you are already in the midst of severe depression, but when things are on a somewhat more even keel, when you have the patience and stability to build up skills for your long-term mental health.

When you bring awareness to your breath, it is this breath, in this moment – not last year’s breath or tomorrow’s breath. The breath is closely connected to the body, and also to the mind; it is a link or bridge between the two. When you tune in to your breathing, your body and mind are in synch – you are present. You can train yourself to use the breath as a haven, or an anchor: when you find you are caught up in a whirlwind of thoughts, you can let it go and come back to this natural process of breathing.

If your mind wanders from the breath a hundred times, just bring it back a hundred times. See if you can escort your awareness back to the breath with kindness and good humour. This is the practice: not keeping the mind fixed in one place, but bringing the mind back, over and over. Use the breath as an anchor to bring you back to here and now, to this moment.

When you start to meditate, you may find it shocking how active your mind is. It flits from one thought to another, often without any obvious logic. It may feel like a monkey leaping from tree to tree. You may even think, ‘I was looking for calm, but when I started to meditate my mind got busier!’ It’s more likely that your mind has been this busy all along, but only now are you creating the conditions for noticing the busyness. In mindfulness we don’t see thoughts as a ‘problem’ – we are not trying to get rid of thoughts to achieve an empty, blank state of mind. Having thoughts is part of who we are as creative, thinking beings. It can be hard to believe this when you start, but the practice of meditation is actually just this: noticing the thoughts, letting them go and bringing the mind back to the focus, again and again. Each time your mind wanders off, it’s another opportunity to practise bringing it back.

Mindfulness practice is sometimes described as being a bit like brushing your teeth. It’s something you can do every day as part of your basic mental hygiene. It’s better to brush your teeth every day for 5 minutes, rather than for an hour on Sundays. In the same way, it’s good to keep the connection with your mindfulness practice by doing a little each day, rather than saving it up for sporadic marathon sessions.

When we go running or to the gym or to pilates class we may push through pain to exert our control over the body. When we eat, how often do we find that ‘our eyes are bigger than our stomach’ or that we are satisfying cravings that have little to do with what the body really wants or needs? In mindfulness, we practise feeling the body from the inside and listening to the messages it sends us. All of our experience is registered in the body – the experiences we like, and those that we don’t. Our body is constantly clenching, bracing, releasing, opening, softening and closing as we react to our experience in each moment. We resist feeling things that are difficult, and this repeated tightening and bracing can create chronic tension in parts of our body – sometimes in more obvious parts like the shoulders or jaw; sometimes deep in the belly, solar plexus or chest. Often we are unaware of how the body is registering the story of our life and our experience in each moment.