Mindfulness

Mindfulness
That ‘do nothing’ critic in your head

I often think that if I could tweak the human mind in some way, the main thing that I would do is to remove the influence of the harsh critic that so many people have in their head.

And the reason I say that is that I’ve come across so many people who have sacrificed themselves for other people and who lead blameless lives, but who are tormented by the critic in the head, that endlessly goes on at them for not being good enough for for making this mistake or that mistake.

From socks to career

The critic, as you may have heard me say before,  will criticise you for everything from the colour socks you’re wearing, to the career you’ve chosen, to where you’re living – it’ll pick on anything.

But I think it’s important to remember this is one point that I want to emphasise here: The critic hasn’t actually, really, done anything. Everything that you’ve done in your life that’s good, was done by you.

Everything that got done

It wasn’t done by that critic. And every struggle that you’ve had to carry out as people do in their lives, has been carried out by you and not by the critic. By remembering this, you get to give far less importance to the critic, to de-throne the critic, so to speak.

So just remember that one thing. The critic hasn’t really done anything. Anything that got done was done by you.

True Friend, my 15 lesson mindfulness course, can help you to dethrone that critic. Payment is by donation. Learn more.

25/07/2024

Mindfulness
4,4,4 – a simple calming exercise for mind and body

The 3-part exercise

In this short extract from my event on happiness in December 2021, I take you through the popular 444 breathing exercise with an imagined flow of calm. Paying attention to your breathing can be almost immediately calming for the nervous system and I explain more about this below. It’s an excellent and quick mindfulness exercise also.

  • Count to 4 while breathing in
  • Hold the breath for a count of 4
  • Count to 4 while breathing out and imagining calm flowing to your heart and stomach areas

Not all in the mind

Neurons, the cells that make everything work, are found in three parts of your nervous system: brain, stomach and heart.

The neurons in your stomach and heart carry information through and from your brain and enable gut and heart to function as best they can. These are in communication with each other all the time and influence each other, including emotionally. For instance, something you are nervous about (a job interview that’s starting in a few minutes, say) affects the emotional part of your brain, your stomach (‘butterflies in your tummy’) and your heart which beats faster.

So calming your body helps to calm your mind. That’s why in this exercise you imagine the sense of calm flowing to your heart and stomach.

This is also a simple and effective mindfulness exercise that brings you into the moment while you are doing it. Mindfulness makes it easier to spot those random moments of happiness and well being that often go unnoticed in the rush of the day.

My 15-lesson course Easy Mindfulness can help you learn many mindfulness techniques to bring more calm to your life.

16/07/2024

Mindfulness
Spotting unexpected happiness

Noticing fleeting feelings of happiness and well-being as I go through my day is to me one of the main benefits of mindfulness.

If you take the time to tune in to your feelings as you go about your business you will find those little, unexplained feelings of happiness appearing from time to time.

Or maybe the explanation is obvious – you’re with someone whose presence makes you happy, you’re doing a piece of work that gives you a sense of satisfaction or you’re anticipating something pleasant from later in the day.

I especially like those little, unexplained feelings I mentioned above, though. I suppose it’s like getting to feel happy for a little while without having to work for it!

These feelings pass as all feelings do. But while they are with me I want to notice and enjoy them.

Dismissing happiness

I think we often dismiss these unexplained feelings. We we want to move on quickly to the current problem.

Here’s the strange thing: we are probably working on the current problem in order to feel happy or to avoid unhappiness – yet when a little random happiness comes along we seem to say ‘please get out of my way, I am too busy figuring out how to be happy to pay attention to you.’

Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?

It may all have something to do with the defensive side of the brain. As Vidyamala Burch and Danny Penman write in Mindfulness for Health, “… the mind focuses on pain and suffering with laser sharpness …” 

And sometimes we dismiss happiness when it seems illogical.

For instance, I once noticed that I felt happy when I was walking through the rain on a cold autumn day. That’s illogical – I don’t like cold rain – but I accepted it as a mysterious bonus and enjoyed the happiness.

The experience taught me that when I’m in a good mood it isn’t always because life got better; when I’m in a low mood it isn’t always because life got worse.

Moods flow through all of us like water in a stream. So make the most of the ones you like while they’re with you; and know the ones you don’t like will pass.

Mindfulness of good moods

To me the key here is to be mindful enough to spot your good moods when they come along.

Very often you can do this through cultivating physical awareness. For some of us a good mood or a sense of happiness is a feeling located between rib cage and tummy. For others it might show itself in a different way.

When we spot feelings of happiness we don’t need to search for an explanation for them; it may even be better not to search. That might be like pulling the petals off a beautiful flower – in doing so you destroy its beauty.

Mistakes

Don’t make the mistake of saying ‘Well, there’s no logical reason why I should feel happy right now’ and dismissing it. Remember that walk in the rain I mentioned at the start? The happiness, though illogical, was worth having.

And watch out for the mistake of saying, ‘well, I have this feeling of happiness but, really, isn’t there something I should be worrying about?’ Yes there probably is, but why ruin this fleeting feeling of happiness?

Welcome it in

We spend much of our lives trying to be happy and to experience wellbeing. Sometimes our efforts work and sometimes they don’t. But when happiness and the sensation of wellbeing come apparently of their own accord let’s welcome them in. The sensation will leave soon – it comes and goes – but at least be mindful of it and enjoy it while it’s here.

My online course, Easy Mindfulness, has helped many participants to cultivate present moment awareness and to improve their quality of life. Payment is by donation.

 

10/07/2024

Mindfulness
Watch out for detrimental thinking

Most of us go around thinking thoughts detrimental to our own happiness, Ayya Khema points out in Know where you’re going.

In other words we get lost in thoughts which repeat fears, anxieties, regrets and resentments. Very often these concern issues we can no longer do anything about because they are in the past or because they haven’t yet happened. In mindfulness we try to get good at coming out of this painful mind-wandering whenever we notice we are lost in it. We do this by shifting awareness to whatever is going on in the present moment, even if that is just to our own breathing.  

Acceptance

We can also come out of painful mind-wandering by accepting what we have to accept (perhaps a loss we’ve sustained) or that isn’t worth fighting (rain when we wanted sunshine, say). This isn’t to say that we should never entertain negative thoughts. Life contains plenty of painful events that need attention or that have had a strong impact and continue to affect us for some time.   It’s making a habit of getting lost in gloom that we have to look out for – and because one of the brain’s primary functions is to keep us out of trouble, we very easily slip into thinking about threats in the future or losses from the past. This includes going over painful events from which we have already, so to speak, sucked the marrow dry. And it includes exaggerated, upsetting thoughts about the future which so often don’t turn out the way we feared.   Too much of this can have a very detrimental effect on a person’s well-being and quality of life.  

Return to awareness

But when we’re mindful we can spot what’s going on and we can return to awareness of the actual reality around us or even to doing some logical planning (as opposed to fantasising) about future events.

We return to that awareness as I said above by bringing our attention to our breath, to our body or to what we are physically doing.

This is well worth practising and the more you practise the better you will be at it. Stepping out of automatic pessimistic thinking is one of the great gifts of mindfulness.

  • Ayya Khema, born in Berlin in 1923 was a Buddhist teacher. Her Jewish family escaped the Nazi persecution. She was best known for promoting the position of women in Buddhism. She was the author of many books. She died in 1997.

My online course Easy Mindfulness will help you make mindfulness part of your daily life and contains lots of material you can download and keep.

03/07/2024

Mindfulness
Gratitude isn’t just good manners – it’s good for you too

We are often urged to practise gratitude to improve our well-being? But does this have any backing in social science? Yes it does and I outlined some examples in my Irish Times column (the column is behind a paywall so here are the relevant extracts) :

“A series of studies reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2003 found that people benefitted from spending time deliberately reflecting on what they felt grateful for.

Benefits

“Benefits included a more optimistic outlook – helpful in many domains of life and, in one group, more time spent exercising. Those who practised gratitude were also more likely to help others. Engaging in the gratitude reflection every day for fifteen minutes had a stronger effect than doing so once a week.

“One of the groups studied was made up of adults with neuromuscular diseases. Participants in this group who practised gratitude also found felt more positive than controls, they had less negative feeling, they slept better and woke up more refreshed. The study covered a period of only a few weeks so the results are impressive.

Teenagers

“In a more recent, longer, study, researchers at California State University found children, aged 10-14, who had grown up to be grateful experienced many benefits. The researchers measured the gratitude levels at the start and end of a 4-year period to establish who were the most grateful. Those in the most grateful twenty per cent had a greater sense of meaning, were more satisfied with their lives, were more happy and hopeful and had fewer negative emotions or symptoms of depression. For more see http://bit.ly/gratefulteens

 

“What all these findings seem to suggest is that cultivating gratitude improves your wellbeing in many ways and that this applies even if you have challenging health conditions.”

How to do it?

How to cultivate gratitude? Try making a mental or written list daily of what you are grateful for. This could include items from today or yesterday or from years ago. If you want to take a really long view you could include events that happened before you were born – for instance a favour that made a big difference in the life of a grandparent and, consequently, to you.

You could write a letter of gratitude to someone for what they have done for you or meant to you – writing such a letter boosts your mood – even if you never post it.

You could divide your life into three sections (dividing your age by three is an easy way to do this) and reflect on something you feel grateful for in each time period.

See if you can feel that gratitude in your heart or tummy areas – these areas connect to the emotional parts of the brain and so can help deepen your sense of gratitude.

In whatever way you’d prefer to do it, try cultivating gratitude in your life and I think you’ll be glad you did it.

Mindfulness helps us to cultivate gratitude – take a look at my  Easy Mindfulness  online course which has 15 lessons you can do whenever you like.

 

21/06/2024

Mindfulness
Moving forward with acceptance

Acceptance means, among other things, acknowledging the reality of situations – but it isn’t the end of the story.

Acceptance is creative. It opens the door to possibilities.

Often acceptance tells us what to do next and can even lead us down new and interesting paths.

If you get a health diagnosis you don’t like, a refusal to accept it can leave you stuck and even failing to do what you need to do to recover or to manage the condition in the best way for you.

Acceptance, on the other hand, means you find out what you need to do next in your own best interests.

Different paths

Acceptance can also lead you down paths that are unconnected with what you are accepting. Say you disagree with a career choice your child has made but he or she is going to stick with that choice whatever you think.

Accepting this might lead you to look at something you want to do in your life and to set about doing it. Maybe you want to learn a language or how to surf big waves off the coast – nothing to do with your child’s career but much more interesting than sitting there complaining about the kids.

Acceptance can be light hearted too. It doesn’t have to be grim and heavy. Depending on what it is that you are accepting, of course, sometimes it’s done with a heavy heart – but usually it’s something we can learn to do with a smile, especially if we’re not demanding that the world dance to our tune.

Acceptance opens doors

I often say acceptance is the other half of mindfulness. And sometimes it’s the better half. So next time you have to accept something, remember acceptance can open doors and see what pathways and possibilities it offers.

Acceptance is a key aspect of mindfulness and my 15-lesson Easy Mindfulness online course can help you to build mindfulness into your life.

 

 

12/06/2024

Mindfulness
Follow your breath, not your thoughts (video)

A key mindfulness approach is to pay more attention to the present moment and less to the stories about the past or the future that our mind wants to tell us. Usually the present moment is a better place in which to be than in the imaginary past or future.

Often our stories of past or imaginings of the future get us lost in old resentments or regrets we can do nothing about or in exaggerated fears.

Moving awareness

But how do you move your attention to the present moment?

One way is to gently move your awareness away from those unhelpful stories in your mind and onto the experience of breathing.

Rest your awareness on your breath

Rest your awareness, so to speak, on your ordinary, normal breathing and keep returning to it until those mind-stories fade away. The more you do this, the better you will be at it.

*Breathing slowly through your nose helps to relax your nervous system especially if you make your outbreath a little longer than your inbreath.

My online course Easy Mindfulness will teach you this and many other ways to bring calm acceptance and other benefits of mindfulness to your life.

See also: A better moment – could this be it?

05/06/2024

Mindfulness
Negativity – it’s not all bad

People involved in wellness sometimes make the mistake of giving the impression that anything negative is bad and that we should aim to feel positive all the time. But that’s not realistic.

Negative feelings often are telling us something that we need to know.

Something you need to do

For instance, if you feel anxious about a particular undone task, maybe there is something you need to do about it.

If you feel guilty, maybe there’s something that you did that wasn’t right, and that you need to try to put right if you can.

If you feel bored, maybe you need to do something different in your day or in your life.

But the key thing is not to get lost in it, not to be overwhelmed by it. We need to be able to step back and see if there’s anything useful here.

If there is, the question then is what could I do about it?

If there isn’t anything useful, you can try to change your focus to something else. For example, feeling very negative over things that happened in the past that you can’t do anything at all about now often isn’t a very useful thing to do. And in such a case, you would try to change your focus to something else.

Mindfulness and stepping back

Mindfulness practice makes it easier to do all of these things. Mindfulness helps you develop the skill of stepping back, through the repeated practice of coming back into the present moment. And that makes it much easier to see what is useful and what is not useful.

That awareness then helps you to, as I said, move your focus to something else; or wait for the feeling to pass by itself; or if there’s something you can do about the issue, to do that something.

So negativity is not always negative, especially when it’s coupled with mindfulness

My Easy Mindfulness online course (15 lessons in your own time)can help you develop that vital skill of stepping back. Payment is by donation, so you can afford it. Learn more here.

Image by LeoHoHo

 

29/05/2024

Mindfulness  ·  Mindfulness Courses
Give help? Yes. Ask for help? No way.

When I was a counselling student, one of my teachers told us that one way to get closer to someone in a long term relationship is to ask them for their help with issues, problems, tasks and so on. Asking recognises the partner’s knowledge and this will do more to bring them close to you than going around acting as if you know everything yourself.
So the benefits of asking for help include more than getting things done.
Reflecting on this, I realised that most of us are willing to extend a helping hand to other people, but very often we’re really reluctant to ask for help ourselves.

Two kinds of people?

As the author Brené Brown writes in Gifts of Imperfection, it’s as if we’ve divided the world into those who offer help and those who need help.

But the truth is that we are both. Nobody gets through a life without large dollops of help. Indeed, it’s a key principle of the philosophy behind mindfulness that everything requires the input and effort of many people: the very shoes on which you walk required, from the creation of the raw materials to the finished product, the work of people you will never see.

What do you need?

Pause and consider: What help do you need that you haven’t been asking for? And if asking for help improves relationships, can you do that more often – even if you already know everything?!
What if fear is an issue? How would you overcome the fear of asking for help? I think, be ok with feeling the fear. Then ask for help in small things, even in things you don’t need help with – maybe asked for and listening to the other person’s opinion. Move on from there – it gets easier.

My True Friend self compassion online course can make it easier to ask for help as you feel better about yourself.  It’s an  online course and payment is by donation so it’s affordable to all. Learn more

23/05/2024

Mindfulness
Changing unwanted behaviours – turn to the true friend

We all have behaviours we want to change – even that we ought to change. Let’s call these ‘unwanted behaviours.’

In setting out to change unwanted behaviours, bear in mind the distinction between a true friend and an abusive critic.

How would an abusive critic address your unwanted behaviours? Probably by telling you that you are useless, a failure, a complete waste of space, perhaps a human being who should never have been born. The critic often seems to be more interested in shaming you than in bringing about a change in your behaviour.

The true friend

How would a true friend address those behaviours? Suppose you are irritated by your child’s need for attention and you deny her your presence most of the time? The true friend might say ‘Look, you are depriving your child of something she actually needs; it hurts her and you will regret it in future if you continue this way.’

But the true friend is talking to you from the basic attitude of friendship and of genuinely wanting what’s right for you and for those you love.

So the healthy and self-compassionate approach is to accept yourself as a true friend would. Then move forward toward making the changes you need to bring about.

Mindfulness helps enormously with all of this. To practise mindfulness you come out of your repetitive thoughts to become aware of whatever is happening in the world outside your head – this could be your breathing, or sounds, for instance – and thereby break the chains of negative, painful thinking that can so easily take over your mind. This makes it much easier to spot that negative thinking and to step back from it.

Psychologist and self-compassion teacher Christopher Germer has pointed out that acceptance, including acceptance of yourself,  comes before change. Carl Rogers and those millions of counsellors who follow Rogers’ ideas, was also deeply convinced that acceptance of the self is the forerunner to those changes that need to happen.

When you know that you have your own friendship no matter what, then you are free to look at yourself honestly. You don’t have to deny the truth.

You don’t have to run away from yourself.

Who is talking?

So when you find yourself judging yourself, I think the first step to take is to ask yourself:

Who is talking? Is it the abusive critic or is it the true friend?

Listen to the true friend.

This article is adapted from a lesson in my online, mindful self-compassion course, True Friend. Pay by donation.  Find out about this 15-lesson course.

More on self-compassion

17/05/2024

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