Here's the
latest issue of Equilibirum, the magazine on wellbeing I produce with
mental health service users in Haringey.
Check it out for a range of articles, including
Alyssa's tale of her ridiculously long bike ride and the importance of taking risks, some great reviews, a bit of science, thoughts on Anti-psychiatry and the Hearing Voices Network, and some gorgeous spring photos.
Here's my article on Mindfulness to whet your appetite, or for those too lazy to click the link....
Mindfulness
On 28th March, I joined a staggering 1000 other people at the Friend’s
House on the Euston Road for An evening
with John Kabat-Zinn. Famed for bringing Mindfulness to the West, 35 years
ago, the evening was a celebration and further investigation into this
practice: ‘an adventure into the art of conscious living’. The event was run by
Action for Happiness, and introduced by their chair, Mark Williamson, an
organisation whose prime concern is to take action to try and create a happier
world. They do this by looking both outside – calling on political leaders and
those with the power to change policy – and inside at the self, in an endeavour
to maximise human wellbeing.
JKZ (as I shall call him, for ease) was welcomed to the stage by Lord
Richard Layard, the economist – and Labour peer – who made the economic case
for IAPT (Improving Access for Psychological Therapy) to the Labour government
in 2006. I was thrilled to hear Layard had not only been involved in JKZ’s
mindfulness course for parliamentarians (I wish they’d make it compulsory in
Whitehall!), but will also be involved in a pilot study to reform PSHE
(Personal, Social, Health Education) in schools, including adding mindfulness
to the curriculum. But, rather than going off on a tangential rant about the
need for cohesive, consistent and relevant emotional and social education in
our schools (a matter close to my heart), I shall try and stick to JKZ and
mindfulness for the moment – and mindfulness is all about the moment!
Mindfulness – a practice rather than a technique, as it is something you
cannot simply learn and store away somewhere, but more a way of living in the
world, ideally a way of living that is practised and observed daily – is drawn
from the principles of Buddhist meditation, and is essentially the act of being
with our experience as it is unfolding, moment by moment. JKZ described it as ‘the
awareness that arises intentionally, in the present moment, non-judgementally’.
Or something like that – it was quite hard to be in the moment, listen, and
frantically scribble notes all at the same time! But breaking it down into its
necessary components, it is:
Awareness
This is not ‘doing nothing’, but ‘non-doing’:
waking up to the world around us; being present without an agenda
Intentional
Interestingly, he described it as ‘a radical
act to wake up early and take your seat every morning’, particularly in a world
where distractions seem everywhere; intentionally being in the moment, rather
than the past or future
Present
Right
now, this very moment
Non-judgemental
He talked about the importance of cultivating
an ‘affectionate attention’; ‘putting the welcome mat out for things as they
are’
Mindfulness is essentially being fully mindful, physically, emotionally,
mentally of the now; my favourite thing he said was ‘Now is the now. Check your
watch – it’s now again’. As a group of over 1000 individuals we all came
together in a moment of formal meditation, quite early on in the evening, which
JKZ instigated by rolling his sleeves up and saying, ‘Let’s arrive’.
Mindfulness is complex in its simplicity and very hard to explain in a few
paragraphs or pages, and thus actually doing it was important to the
discussion. I found myself repeatedly trying to explain it in my head
throughout the evening, knowing my partner would ask when I go home what it had
been about. And, pre-emptive of her questioning, trying to answer: But what
purpose does it serve? And, as I was trying to be mindful, my thoughts were
going: Yes, it’s all very nice to have
some quiet time, to reflect, but… although, hang on, we’re in the now, aren’t
we? So, we’re not reflecting, we’re….what are we doing again? Oh yes, trying
not to think. Eek, I’ve ruined it: I’m thinking. And now I’m worrying about
thinking. Which is even worse! Arghhh, I’m really bad at this! So goes the
mind chatter.
JKZ says: ‘We need to get out of our own way, to the silence underneath
and between every sound’. But, as a relative novice, it’s hard not to want to
shout: ‘How?!!’ Yet – and as an educationalist, this is something I hold true
for many things – he says we should covet a beginner’s mind, the place where we
see things newly, freshly, and non-judgmentally. He also repeatedly reinforced
that you can’t develop muscles without resistance, so the fact that trying to
be a human being, rather than a human
doing, is hard is part of the
process. And part of why this is a practice, rather than a technique. He used
the analogy of thoughts as weather patterns in the mind, drifting across, which
is a metaphor I find really helpful, and will certainly use to calm my
chattering mind.
I worried that it could be seen as ego-centric and self-absorbed to
dedicate that much time to yourself (which is indicative of both my own hang
ups regarding guilt over self-compassion, and that I find any talk of
‘cultivating the garden of the heart’ flips my sceptical switch on). But – and
really there doesn’t need to be a ‘but’ to justify it, but I’ll slip one in for
other sceptics out there – mindfulness looks out as well as in, and is also
about ‘being in wise relationship with the suffering and happiness around us’,
learning self-compassion and compassion for others. JKZ also highlighted
the urgency of it: destruction is woven into our human nature, and we need to
take action – radical, sitting down in silence action it may be – to transform
the world we live it. And although he told us, ‘You’re fine the way you are’,
none of us would be worse for being mindful of the world in which we live, at
this moment, exactly as it is and we are. Interestingly, in all Asian languages
the word for heart and mind is the same thing; mindfulness is also
heartfulness.
If you need more convincing to take a quiet seat every morning and
attune yourself to the cosmos, there is also some amazing sciencey stuff to do
with epi-genetics, biochemistry, enzymes and things, which I’m probably not
clever enough to explain, so you might want to google. Although the crux of it
was that daily practice of mindfulness leads to greater emotional balance,
caused by more left than right brain activation in the pre-frontal cortex, and
greater anti-body production.
If mindfulness is therefore an ‘act of love, sanity and
self-compassion’, which has a positive impact on not just my emotional but also
my physical wellbeing, and which also builds compassion for others, then I’m
sold. And you can do it sitting down – brilliant!
