From naughty steps to mindful steps

Our very old mindful steps

Some homes have a "naughty step" which children must go and sit on without benefit of gadgets or toys when they break the rules of the house.

We never had those in our house. What we have are two "mindful steps".

These two steps, which date back, so far as I know, to the 1880s, lead to what would have been the kitchen and the maid's room. Therefore, people have hurried over these steps for more more than a century.

Recently I decided to look on these as mindful steps that can remind me to be mindful. The idea, simply, is that whenever I go up and down those two steps I will do so in awareness. This is known as a "mindfulness cue."

I have been surprised at how long it has taken to begin to be aware of them even part of the time as I use them. But I'm persisting and gradually I find the steps are beginning to pull me out of the trance in my mind and into present moment awareness more and more often.

I don't know if you have steps like those in your home but perhaps you have an equivalent: a door to a room you go in and out of a lot, for instance, or a window you open and close that you could use for the same purpose. If you do, I would be glad to hear of it.

All of it - accepting the motorbike in the silence

You're in your room having a moment of peace in the morning. You look on it as a meditative experience. You hear a motorbike in the distance. The motorbike comes closer, roars past and then takes some time to disappear into the distance again.

This happens the next morning and the next and the next. You settle into your meditative moment and then roarrrrr!

You start to resent the motorbike.  Soon you are getting upset by the motorbike long before it appears and long after it disappears.

From the mindfulness prospective, you need to become willing to experience the world as it is. The world as it is includes both the silence and the sound of that motorbike coming up the road and disappearing again. When you include the motorbike in your morning with acceptance you will, with luck, make your peace with it. But at the very least you should find that you will no longer obsess about it at other times.

If you were a dictator you could perhaps pass a law to forbid motorbikes from passing your window at certain times of the morning. What are you to do, though, about planes passing overhead? Trains in the distance? Crows singing raucously in the trees? By the time you have sorted all that out your peace will be shredded. 

In mindfulness you do not struggle with the reality of how things are. Yes, if you can find a sensible, workable way to change them you will most likely do that (a change of room or of time in this case perhaps). But very often no such workable way exists. For that reason, changing your relationship from rejection towards acceptance can make a major difference to your sense of well-being in your daily life.

Using a smartphone? Click here to learn about my online, two hour and six week mindfulness courses.

Six ways to make 2015 a mindful year

Practising mindfulness - or practising mindfulness more often - is an aspiration many people will have for 2015. To make it happen, try these six tips:

1. Don't start with long meditations.
It's good to sit and observe your breathing mindfully for 20 minutes a day - but most people give up after a few days. Instead, find short practices that help to bring you into mindfulness many times a day. The best mindfulness practices are the ones you will actually do - not the ones you "ought" to do.

2. Remind yourself often: Return. Invite silence.
A useful working definition of mindfulness could be: Returning your attention again and again with acceptance to what's going on outside your head right now. What's going on outside your head could be your breath, the feeling of your feet against the ground, sounds, a conversation you're having and so on. Acceptance means postponing judgement for at least a while. We usually judge through statements of condemnation or approval that we make to ourselves in our heads. So you could think of acceptance as inviting silence into your mind for a while. So, Return. Invite silence.

3. At the start of every day, form the intention to be mindful.
Form the intention before your feet touch the floor when you get up in the morning. This could be a simple as telling yourself, "I intend to be mindful today." Far better than grumbling on the way out of the bed!

4. Return to awareness of your breathing for a least a minute whenever you notice an hour has passed.
It is said that mindfulness is easy to do but hard to remember to do. Most of us are surrounded by reminders of the time, so resolve that whenever you notice an hour has passed you will come into awareness of your breathing for at least a minute. You don't have to be exact: just guess it. Your mind will drift even during that short time so bring your attention back without complaint or self-criticism.

5. Build mindfulness reminders into your day.
To do this, choose one or two routine activities which you normally do with little awareness of the moment. Let them remind you to be mindful and do them in awarenness. Examples: Brushing your teeth, boiling the kettle, starting the car, entering passwords, washing your hands, washing dishes, preparing food, eating, moving from room to room, showering, opening your door on the way to/from work.

6. Use a free mindfulness resource.
You'll find many free mindfulness resources on the internet. Thousands of people receive a brief daily mindfulness reminder in their email from myself. It's called The Daily Bell, even though it doesn't actually ring, and you'll find a sign-up box on the front page of this blog or on my website at www.padraigomorain.com You can also email me at pomorain@gmx.com and ask me to sign you up.

For more ideas try these posts on this blog:
A mindfulness routine
Morning grouch? Try a mindfulness routine
Mindful walking from The Irish Times

Click for my free audios/resources and my courses. 

Second arrows - how we add to our own distress and what we can do about it

I recently mentioned the Buddhist metaphor of the two arrows in relation to regret but the metaphor is relevant to all forms of distress.

As I wrote at the time: "If you were struck by an arrow you would be in pain, no doubt about it. But if you dwell on that experience by going over and over it in your memory or by entertaining revenge fantasies for years afterwards, then you are shooting a second arrow into yourself."

Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön says this, in Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living:

“If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart...”

(Yes, you would be dead if someone shot an arrow into your heart but this is a metaphorical arrow so that's okay).

Part of the practice of mindfulness is to be willing to experience the first arrows that come every day (let-downs, bad turns, cravings, pain) and to do what you need to do but without adding to them by cycling scenes and thoughts in your head again and again. For instance, you could practice returning your attention to your breath or to your surroundings whenever those old scenes start re-running.

This is easier to do if you have a formal mindfulness practice but even if not, you can adopt the two arrows metaphor as part of your approach to daily living.

A mindfulness routine

To help with mindfulness practice it can be very useful to have a short routine that you can go through a few times a day. If the foundation of that routine is awareness of your body, it becomes easier to remember and implement. Here is an example:

As you are reading this, notice your shoulders and let them relax a little. We tense up our shoulders, often unconsciously, if we are stressed so it is helpful to begin by noticing and relaxing your shoulders.

Next notice your breathing but without trying to control it. When your mind drifts away, return your attention gently to what you are doing.

Now notice your posture. Awareness of posture has been regarded as a valuable mindfulness practice for centuries. Whether you are sitting, walking, standing or lying down, become aware of what this feels like.

What you have done with this routine is to step out of the stream of the wandering, drifting mind and into deliberate awareness, in this case of your breath and your posture. Whenever you use this routine - or one of your own if your prefer - it will bring you presence of mind instead of having a mind that is easily swept away by events, thoughts or emotions.

Using a smartphone? Click here to learn about my online, two hour and six week mindfulness courses.

Mindfulness is not an anaesthetic

You can feel despair, depression, fear, anger, frustration although you practice mindfulness every day - that’s my experience anyway. Claims that mindfulness will put you into a state of permanent peace are just that - claims. 

It is necessary to be willing to practice mindfulness alongside painful emotions. Mindfulness practice keeps you out of the forest of thoughts, rumination and brooding which worsens any and all of these experiences. Moreover, your day includes good experiences that have nothing to do with negative emotions and mindfulness practice allows you to notice these too. 

So you can allow emotional pain to accompany you through your day so that you do not become consumed by your pain although it is still pain and it is still unpleasant. Thich Nhat Hahn writes somewhere that you should “walk like a free man and not like a slave.”

In a sense, that is what mindfulness of emotional (and physical) pain is about: going through your day like a free person who has pain but who is not a slave to that pain.

Mindful stillness

In stillness, you come to yourself. You claim your autonomy. I don't mean the drugged stillness of someone hypnotised by a TV. I mean an alert stillness as practiced in mindfulness.

You can practice stillness by sitting on a chair or a cushion and setting a period of time aside for this work. Or you can watch out for what might be called accidental opportunities for stillness. You might be sitting on a bus or a train, at your desk or in a waiting room and use this as an accidental opportunity to cultivate stillness.

In stillness you step out of the conversation in your head. You place your attention on the feeling of your body at rest. In particular I think it is helpful to notice your hands. Let your hands be still and just notice them. Notice their warmth. As you notice them, they will almost certainly become warmer. And notice your breathing. Notice your tummy, your diaphragm as you breathe. Through this noticing you cultivate stillness.

That is all you have to do. Stillness is so simple and yet many of us fail to benefit from it. In a busy world it is possible even to feel you are doing something subversive when you practice stillness. Perhaps the stillness police will to tap on your shoulder and issue you with a fine for failing to be busy enough!

Yes, stillness police exist - mostly inside our own heads. Our own anxieties, allowed to scamper around our minds like chattering monkeys, assure us that the world will end if we practice stillness in the middle of the day.

At times, we fall very naturally into stillness. People who are in love can be still with each other, look into each other's eyes for ages and find the whole experience very agreeable indeed. A parent can experience a wonderful sense of stillness holding a sleeping baby.

Even crowds can be still. Think of the crowd at a football match when a crucial penalty is about to be taken. You may have experienced stillness in the theatre or at a concert. So stillness is not a strange, esoteric thing. Stillness is your heritage. Claim it in mindfulness.

Practice: From time to time, notice opportunities for stillness. In particular notice the stillness in your hands. Step out of the conversation in your mind to practice stillness even if only for half a minute.

My book Light Mind - Mindfulness for Daily Living is published by Veritas. Click on "more details" to read a sample chapter. For monthly mindfulness exercises, email me at pomorainATgmx.com (replace the AT with @) and I will put you on the mailing list for my free newsletter.