Naleena
Well-known member
How Could Mindfulness Help Me?
As the subtitle of this web page indicates, mindfulness is an inner capacity or resource that everyone can cultivate, and one that can be very helpful for overcoming suffering and achieving greater freedom and happiness. Of course, other important capacities and abilities, including emotion regulation skills and kindness toward oneself and other people (see below), are also necessary to overcome habitual patterns developed to cope with unwanted experiences and emotions. Mindfulness is not a "miracle cure" that single-handedly eliminates suffering-causing habits of perceiving, thinking, feeling and behaving which may have been ingrained since childhood. Still, it can help a lot...
There are several ways that mindfulness can help reduce the intensity, duration, and frequency of unhelpful habitual response patterns. The following outlines how some of these effects can occur and accumulate. (The next section of this page gives an overview of how people can cultivate mindfulness over the short and long term.)
Loosening the grip of habitual responses that cause (additional) suffering.
Learning to bring one's attention back to the present moment, including the ever-present process of breathing, over and over again, involves learning to catch oneself entering into habitual patterns that prevent clear awareness of the present moment. With continued practice and increasing development of mindfulness, one becomes increasingly able to notice those habitual reactions – to unwanted and wanted but unhealthy experiences and emotions – that prevent one from responding consciously and constructively.
For example, instead of realizing 5-10 minutes later that you've been lost in bad memories or fantasies of revenge, you can catch yourself after only 30-60 seconds. Better yet, you can learn to catch yourself in the process of getting lost in a memory or fantasy. In time, you can increasingly observe these habitual responses as they arise, and choose to respond in other, more skillful ways.
Learning to non-judgmentally observe such habitual responses loosens their grip too. Again, after bringing your wandering attention back to the breath thousands of times, you are less likely to beat up on yourself for getting distracted. Instead, you can simply observe that some distracting habit of perceiving, thinking, feeling or behaving has occurred, and come back to your breathing in the present moment. Over time, you will be increasingly able to bring the same non-judgmental awareness to the various unhelpful habitual responses you have to experiences in daily life.
For example, instead of getting really angry at yourself for feeling helpless and sad when someone makes a harsh comment, or feeling guilty when you start thinking of harsh replies, you might notice, without judgment, that you have the habit of responding to harsh comments with (a) feelings of helplessness and sadness, followed by (b) angry thoughts of come-backs, followed by (c) anger and guilt about those initial responses. Once you notice such common human responses in yourself without judgment, you can choose to bring your attention back to what's actually happening in the conversation now, to consider whether and how you might redirect or end the conversation without creating more negative feelings, etc.
Another example: Rather than coming home from work really stressed out and, when you get the chance, reaching for alcohol (or marijuana or porn or whatever) to escape the stress and bad feelings, you could set aside some time to simply observe the unpleasant emotions and physical sensations of your "stress," including the thoughts, images and impulses to seek escape (perhaps in ways that cause stress and shame in their own right).
Clearly such changes in one's awareness and attention, which loosen the grip of habitual response patterns, bring greater freedom to choose how one responds to the inevitable unpleasant and unwanted experiences of life and relationships.
Reducing the intensity of unhelpful habitual responses. Some of the ways mindfulness helps with this are obvious from the comments above, and others are worth mentioning as well.
The less time a habitual response has to develop, the less likely it will become intense. Of course, some habitual responses happen extremely quickly and almost instantaneously reach high levels of emotional intensity and behavioral impulsiveness. But most of the time, it takes a few seconds for a habitual response to reach a high level of intensity, and "nipping it in the bud" prevents a full flowering of destructive emotion.
If within the first few seconds you can recognize, with some reflective awareness, that the habitual response is occurring, then you have an opportunity to prevent further escalation. After all, these are chain reactions in the mind and body, and if you can break an early link, you can stop the process.
The less judgment one has toward a habitual response, the less likely it will become intense. This doesn't mean that one simply accepts one's habitual responses. Rather, it means that you neither accept nor condemn. Instead, you simply observe them for what they are: habitual and, however quirky or bizarre, quite human responses to unwanted experiences. If you can observe these responses without judgment, no matter how immature or unhelpful they may be, you can avoid adding more emotional fuel to the fire.
There are several ways that mindfulness can help to quiet and calm the mind, which increases the occurrence of positive feelings like enjoyment, appreciation, gratitude and general happiness. Similarly, by cultivating positive emotions, particularly ones involving kindness toward yourself and others, you help calm your mind. You can learn to make this healing and happiness promoting cycle work for you.
The following outlines how these effects can occur and accumulate, and offers some exercises that help bring these benefits.
Slowing the pace of thoughts.
The more one practices just noticing thoughts and bringing attention back to the breath (or other current sensations in the body), the more "gaps" occur between chains of thoughts and the individual thoughts within them. Your thoughts become less compelling and demanding of your attention and energy. The continual inner "chatter" and images of the past and future don't go away, since that's the nature of the human mind. But they do "settle down." And this slowing and settling down of mental processes, particularly when you don't need them to be moving quickly, brings relaxation, and brings the freedom to choose what to think about rather than being dragged along. This effect is often experienced after only 10 or 15 minutes of mindful attention to one's breathing.
One way to convey this is imagining your mind as an excited puppy – running after every bone it sees, even sticks and rocks, anything that gets its attention, scurrying from one to the next as fast as it can. Like the immature puppy, your mind needs training to slow down and serve your needs rather than being carried away by emotions and distractions.
If you can cultivate the ability to slow down your mind by practicing mindfulness, you can bring this ability to times of pain and suffering. Instead of jumping quickly from an experience in which you feel sad (or helpless or disrespected or whatever) to feelings of anger, shame and guilt – and before you know it finding yourself in a blizzard of negative thoughts, feelings and memories – the outcome can be different. You might notice the chaining of one brief negative mental state to another, and the links and gaps between them, and be able to choose another direction, like calming yourself, reminding yourself to focus on what brought up the negative feelings in the first place, or bringing your attention back to the current situation and your goals for it.
Increasing the spaciousness of present awareness.
Think of a time you were really stressed recently. Not only were your thoughts moving really fast, and probably somewhat out of control, but your current awareness was "clogged" with negative thoughts, feelings, memories, images, etc. For most people, most of the time, not just when they're stressed, their current awareness is virtually packed with thoughts, feelings, images, etc. – and not only about what they're currently doing. Consider driving. You may be noticing the road enough to navigate, but you're also thinking about the past, reliving conversations and interactions, planning the future, etc. On top of all that, the radio could be on. In fact, much of the time people are not aware of the present moment, but only a small and dim glimmer of the present surrounded by a fog of thoughts and images of the past and future.
By practicing focusing your attention on the present, and gently coming back to the present when you've wandered into the past and future again, you can expand your present awareness. Not only does the present moment become more vivid and fresh, but your awareness becomes more spacious, less clogged with extra and unnecessary thoughts, feelings and images. You can probably remember what this experience is like, by remembering a time when you were calm, relaxed, and not under pressure to do anything - maybe lying on the beach several days into a vacation, or on a long and relaxing hike in nature.
Also, the more spacious your present awareness, the less likely that negative thoughts, feelings, and memories, when they inevitably arise, will dominate your experience and become overwhelming. With a more spacious awareness, you can have unwanted and painful experiences but have enough "mental space" to remember and experience positive and healthy thoughts, memories, and images of your future. You can tap into larger perspectives on your life and who you are, what you have accomplished, and what you are capable of achieving.
Try a "big mind" exercise with a difficult response or emotion (but not yet one that's really difficult). As the negative experience arises, close your eyes and imagine your mind getting bigger and bigger to hold it. Imagine your mind as wide as the sky. When you feel your mind as wide as the sky, where is the difficulty then? What happens to it? How does it feel in this "big mind?" This is an experience and ability that, with practice, you can bring to increasingly difficult and painful experiences.
Functionally, making the mind bigger is like this: If you put a teaspoon of salt into a glass of water it will taste very salty and be hard to drink. But if you put that salt into a lake, you won't even be able to taste it. Like the "big mind" practice, mindfulness is about expanding the container for difficult emotions, like pouring salty water from a glass into a lake. When you have that more spacious mind, watch how thoughts come and go and come and go. Thoughts and feelings are always arising and passing away. It is their nature to do this. In some ways, simply seeing this can help us relax and not worry about them. Spaciousness of mind allows this to happen.
If you have a spacious experience of the present moment, or can let go of unnecessary thoughts and allow that spaciousness to emerge, you will also have more room to experience the fullness of positive feelings, the fullness of what you're seeing and hearing, of whatever situation you're in. Of course we all need to focus our attention sometimes, but the calmer and more spacious our present awareness, the more fully alive to the present we are when really focused concentration isn't needed. Practicing mindfulness can show you just what these words are describing, even when you're feeling down.
Noticing, enjoying and cultivating positive experiences and emotions.
Stressful times, and too much of life in general, can involve repeatedly focusing on difficult experiences and unpleasant emotions. It's extremely important to train the mind to notice and enhance positive emotions too.
Mindfulness can help you notice the positive emotions that spontaneously arise in your experience. If you're going through your life feeling down much of the time, reexperiencing negative emotions resulting from past negative experiences, it can become hard even to notice positive emotions. Or positive emotions can be swamped and overwhelmed by more familiar negative ones before you even notice. Also, sometimes people actually dismiss positive feelings, because they're afraid to get their hopes up. They think to themselves, "it won't last, so why bother focusing on it?"
Practicing bringing your attention to whatever arises in the present moment, and noticing it without judgment, makes you much more likely to notice positive experiences and emotions and much less likely to judge or dismiss them. Particularly when your mind is moving more slowly, and is relatively spacious, positive feelings have an opportunity to grow, last longer and lead to other positive feelings. And many positive emotions, particularly feelings of appreciation, kindness and love, help to enhance the mind's calmness.
Thus mindfulness, on its own, is not enough – even to cultivate and sustain mindfulness. To increase the likelihood of being mindful, it is necessary to increase the likelihood of experiencing positive emotions that lead to mental calm and spaciousness. As discussed kindness is an essential companion of mindfulness. But as you certainly know, many other positive emotions are good for your mind and body, in many ways besides promoting mindfulness. For many people, particularly who had painful childhoods, active and disciplined efforts are necessary to generate and nurture positive feelings. To play a musical instrument, or be successful at a sport, we must practice. That's how our brains work. So of course it can be helpful to practice cultivating and maintaining positive emotions.
For starters, you might try this exercise: Make a list of positive emotions. Take a day to practice noticing positive emotions as they occur. When did you feel joy today? Curiosity? Ease? Pleasure? Humor? Affection? Even in the most depressed person, positive emotions happen many times a day. Just noticing these can challenge such assumptions as "I'm sad all the time," or "I was anxious all day." It is also useful to look for neutral moments. Were there moments today when you didn't feel difficult emotions? When you were brushing your teeth? Drinking a glass of water? Reading?
For more on cultivating positive emotions, see the sections below, "Kindness - An Essential Companion of Mindfulness," and "Recommended Books, CDs/Tapes, and Articles.")
One more benefit of mindfulness is worth mentioning here. Mindfulness can help you see and make connections that weren't there before. By this point, as you read what's below, it will be clear how this benefit both promotes and is promoted by those mentioned above.
Many people have learned to block out feelings, or never learned how to be aware of some, which means they often don't recognize an emotion in themselves until it's become extreme. This does not mean that one lacks emotional responses to things that happen, just that one's emotions are mostly operating out of awareness and on "autopilot." This can be particularly true for people who have numbed themselves to their emotions with addictive relationships to alcohol, drugs, food, pornography and other "fixes."
If one doesn't notice or pay attention to one's emotions and they run on autopilot, many opportunities for observing and working with emotional chain reactions are lost. But that's how our minds and emotions tend to work: Based on past conditioning, current situations and stimuli – both external and internal – trigger emotional associations and reactions. Such triggering happens automatically, without our having any say in the matter.
Mindfulness helps people to notice these associations and triggerings as they occur, or at least before a chain of them results in overwhelming emotions or impulsive actions. That is, mindfulness can help you see and make connections between perceptions, thoughts, memories, emotions and impulses – connections that have always been there, but operating outside of your relatively limited awareness – in a way that prevents your mind and body from going out of control without you knowing why. In short, while you have no say over the initial conditioned responses that you have, once you're aware of them and not judging them, you can have a lot of influence over what happens next.
http://www.jimhopper.com/mindfulness
As the subtitle of this web page indicates, mindfulness is an inner capacity or resource that everyone can cultivate, and one that can be very helpful for overcoming suffering and achieving greater freedom and happiness. Of course, other important capacities and abilities, including emotion regulation skills and kindness toward oneself and other people (see below), are also necessary to overcome habitual patterns developed to cope with unwanted experiences and emotions. Mindfulness is not a "miracle cure" that single-handedly eliminates suffering-causing habits of perceiving, thinking, feeling and behaving which may have been ingrained since childhood. Still, it can help a lot...
There are several ways that mindfulness can help reduce the intensity, duration, and frequency of unhelpful habitual response patterns. The following outlines how some of these effects can occur and accumulate. (The next section of this page gives an overview of how people can cultivate mindfulness over the short and long term.)
Loosening the grip of habitual responses that cause (additional) suffering.
Learning to bring one's attention back to the present moment, including the ever-present process of breathing, over and over again, involves learning to catch oneself entering into habitual patterns that prevent clear awareness of the present moment. With continued practice and increasing development of mindfulness, one becomes increasingly able to notice those habitual reactions – to unwanted and wanted but unhealthy experiences and emotions – that prevent one from responding consciously and constructively.
For example, instead of realizing 5-10 minutes later that you've been lost in bad memories or fantasies of revenge, you can catch yourself after only 30-60 seconds. Better yet, you can learn to catch yourself in the process of getting lost in a memory or fantasy. In time, you can increasingly observe these habitual responses as they arise, and choose to respond in other, more skillful ways.
Learning to non-judgmentally observe such habitual responses loosens their grip too. Again, after bringing your wandering attention back to the breath thousands of times, you are less likely to beat up on yourself for getting distracted. Instead, you can simply observe that some distracting habit of perceiving, thinking, feeling or behaving has occurred, and come back to your breathing in the present moment. Over time, you will be increasingly able to bring the same non-judgmental awareness to the various unhelpful habitual responses you have to experiences in daily life.
For example, instead of getting really angry at yourself for feeling helpless and sad when someone makes a harsh comment, or feeling guilty when you start thinking of harsh replies, you might notice, without judgment, that you have the habit of responding to harsh comments with (a) feelings of helplessness and sadness, followed by (b) angry thoughts of come-backs, followed by (c) anger and guilt about those initial responses. Once you notice such common human responses in yourself without judgment, you can choose to bring your attention back to what's actually happening in the conversation now, to consider whether and how you might redirect or end the conversation without creating more negative feelings, etc.
Another example: Rather than coming home from work really stressed out and, when you get the chance, reaching for alcohol (or marijuana or porn or whatever) to escape the stress and bad feelings, you could set aside some time to simply observe the unpleasant emotions and physical sensations of your "stress," including the thoughts, images and impulses to seek escape (perhaps in ways that cause stress and shame in their own right).
Clearly such changes in one's awareness and attention, which loosen the grip of habitual response patterns, bring greater freedom to choose how one responds to the inevitable unpleasant and unwanted experiences of life and relationships.
Reducing the intensity of unhelpful habitual responses. Some of the ways mindfulness helps with this are obvious from the comments above, and others are worth mentioning as well.
The less time a habitual response has to develop, the less likely it will become intense. Of course, some habitual responses happen extremely quickly and almost instantaneously reach high levels of emotional intensity and behavioral impulsiveness. But most of the time, it takes a few seconds for a habitual response to reach a high level of intensity, and "nipping it in the bud" prevents a full flowering of destructive emotion.
If within the first few seconds you can recognize, with some reflective awareness, that the habitual response is occurring, then you have an opportunity to prevent further escalation. After all, these are chain reactions in the mind and body, and if you can break an early link, you can stop the process.
The less judgment one has toward a habitual response, the less likely it will become intense. This doesn't mean that one simply accepts one's habitual responses. Rather, it means that you neither accept nor condemn. Instead, you simply observe them for what they are: habitual and, however quirky or bizarre, quite human responses to unwanted experiences. If you can observe these responses without judgment, no matter how immature or unhelpful they may be, you can avoid adding more emotional fuel to the fire.
There are several ways that mindfulness can help to quiet and calm the mind, which increases the occurrence of positive feelings like enjoyment, appreciation, gratitude and general happiness. Similarly, by cultivating positive emotions, particularly ones involving kindness toward yourself and others, you help calm your mind. You can learn to make this healing and happiness promoting cycle work for you.
The following outlines how these effects can occur and accumulate, and offers some exercises that help bring these benefits.
Slowing the pace of thoughts.
The more one practices just noticing thoughts and bringing attention back to the breath (or other current sensations in the body), the more "gaps" occur between chains of thoughts and the individual thoughts within them. Your thoughts become less compelling and demanding of your attention and energy. The continual inner "chatter" and images of the past and future don't go away, since that's the nature of the human mind. But they do "settle down." And this slowing and settling down of mental processes, particularly when you don't need them to be moving quickly, brings relaxation, and brings the freedom to choose what to think about rather than being dragged along. This effect is often experienced after only 10 or 15 minutes of mindful attention to one's breathing.
One way to convey this is imagining your mind as an excited puppy – running after every bone it sees, even sticks and rocks, anything that gets its attention, scurrying from one to the next as fast as it can. Like the immature puppy, your mind needs training to slow down and serve your needs rather than being carried away by emotions and distractions.
If you can cultivate the ability to slow down your mind by practicing mindfulness, you can bring this ability to times of pain and suffering. Instead of jumping quickly from an experience in which you feel sad (or helpless or disrespected or whatever) to feelings of anger, shame and guilt – and before you know it finding yourself in a blizzard of negative thoughts, feelings and memories – the outcome can be different. You might notice the chaining of one brief negative mental state to another, and the links and gaps between them, and be able to choose another direction, like calming yourself, reminding yourself to focus on what brought up the negative feelings in the first place, or bringing your attention back to the current situation and your goals for it.
Increasing the spaciousness of present awareness.
Think of a time you were really stressed recently. Not only were your thoughts moving really fast, and probably somewhat out of control, but your current awareness was "clogged" with negative thoughts, feelings, memories, images, etc. For most people, most of the time, not just when they're stressed, their current awareness is virtually packed with thoughts, feelings, images, etc. – and not only about what they're currently doing. Consider driving. You may be noticing the road enough to navigate, but you're also thinking about the past, reliving conversations and interactions, planning the future, etc. On top of all that, the radio could be on. In fact, much of the time people are not aware of the present moment, but only a small and dim glimmer of the present surrounded by a fog of thoughts and images of the past and future.
By practicing focusing your attention on the present, and gently coming back to the present when you've wandered into the past and future again, you can expand your present awareness. Not only does the present moment become more vivid and fresh, but your awareness becomes more spacious, less clogged with extra and unnecessary thoughts, feelings and images. You can probably remember what this experience is like, by remembering a time when you were calm, relaxed, and not under pressure to do anything - maybe lying on the beach several days into a vacation, or on a long and relaxing hike in nature.
Also, the more spacious your present awareness, the less likely that negative thoughts, feelings, and memories, when they inevitably arise, will dominate your experience and become overwhelming. With a more spacious awareness, you can have unwanted and painful experiences but have enough "mental space" to remember and experience positive and healthy thoughts, memories, and images of your future. You can tap into larger perspectives on your life and who you are, what you have accomplished, and what you are capable of achieving.
Try a "big mind" exercise with a difficult response or emotion (but not yet one that's really difficult). As the negative experience arises, close your eyes and imagine your mind getting bigger and bigger to hold it. Imagine your mind as wide as the sky. When you feel your mind as wide as the sky, where is the difficulty then? What happens to it? How does it feel in this "big mind?" This is an experience and ability that, with practice, you can bring to increasingly difficult and painful experiences.
Functionally, making the mind bigger is like this: If you put a teaspoon of salt into a glass of water it will taste very salty and be hard to drink. But if you put that salt into a lake, you won't even be able to taste it. Like the "big mind" practice, mindfulness is about expanding the container for difficult emotions, like pouring salty water from a glass into a lake. When you have that more spacious mind, watch how thoughts come and go and come and go. Thoughts and feelings are always arising and passing away. It is their nature to do this. In some ways, simply seeing this can help us relax and not worry about them. Spaciousness of mind allows this to happen.
If you have a spacious experience of the present moment, or can let go of unnecessary thoughts and allow that spaciousness to emerge, you will also have more room to experience the fullness of positive feelings, the fullness of what you're seeing and hearing, of whatever situation you're in. Of course we all need to focus our attention sometimes, but the calmer and more spacious our present awareness, the more fully alive to the present we are when really focused concentration isn't needed. Practicing mindfulness can show you just what these words are describing, even when you're feeling down.
Noticing, enjoying and cultivating positive experiences and emotions.
Stressful times, and too much of life in general, can involve repeatedly focusing on difficult experiences and unpleasant emotions. It's extremely important to train the mind to notice and enhance positive emotions too.
Mindfulness can help you notice the positive emotions that spontaneously arise in your experience. If you're going through your life feeling down much of the time, reexperiencing negative emotions resulting from past negative experiences, it can become hard even to notice positive emotions. Or positive emotions can be swamped and overwhelmed by more familiar negative ones before you even notice. Also, sometimes people actually dismiss positive feelings, because they're afraid to get their hopes up. They think to themselves, "it won't last, so why bother focusing on it?"
Practicing bringing your attention to whatever arises in the present moment, and noticing it without judgment, makes you much more likely to notice positive experiences and emotions and much less likely to judge or dismiss them. Particularly when your mind is moving more slowly, and is relatively spacious, positive feelings have an opportunity to grow, last longer and lead to other positive feelings. And many positive emotions, particularly feelings of appreciation, kindness and love, help to enhance the mind's calmness.
Thus mindfulness, on its own, is not enough – even to cultivate and sustain mindfulness. To increase the likelihood of being mindful, it is necessary to increase the likelihood of experiencing positive emotions that lead to mental calm and spaciousness. As discussed kindness is an essential companion of mindfulness. But as you certainly know, many other positive emotions are good for your mind and body, in many ways besides promoting mindfulness. For many people, particularly who had painful childhoods, active and disciplined efforts are necessary to generate and nurture positive feelings. To play a musical instrument, or be successful at a sport, we must practice. That's how our brains work. So of course it can be helpful to practice cultivating and maintaining positive emotions.
For starters, you might try this exercise: Make a list of positive emotions. Take a day to practice noticing positive emotions as they occur. When did you feel joy today? Curiosity? Ease? Pleasure? Humor? Affection? Even in the most depressed person, positive emotions happen many times a day. Just noticing these can challenge such assumptions as "I'm sad all the time," or "I was anxious all day." It is also useful to look for neutral moments. Were there moments today when you didn't feel difficult emotions? When you were brushing your teeth? Drinking a glass of water? Reading?
For more on cultivating positive emotions, see the sections below, "Kindness - An Essential Companion of Mindfulness," and "Recommended Books, CDs/Tapes, and Articles.")
One more benefit of mindfulness is worth mentioning here. Mindfulness can help you see and make connections that weren't there before. By this point, as you read what's below, it will be clear how this benefit both promotes and is promoted by those mentioned above.
Many people have learned to block out feelings, or never learned how to be aware of some, which means they often don't recognize an emotion in themselves until it's become extreme. This does not mean that one lacks emotional responses to things that happen, just that one's emotions are mostly operating out of awareness and on "autopilot." This can be particularly true for people who have numbed themselves to their emotions with addictive relationships to alcohol, drugs, food, pornography and other "fixes."
If one doesn't notice or pay attention to one's emotions and they run on autopilot, many opportunities for observing and working with emotional chain reactions are lost. But that's how our minds and emotions tend to work: Based on past conditioning, current situations and stimuli – both external and internal – trigger emotional associations and reactions. Such triggering happens automatically, without our having any say in the matter.
Mindfulness helps people to notice these associations and triggerings as they occur, or at least before a chain of them results in overwhelming emotions or impulsive actions. That is, mindfulness can help you see and make connections between perceptions, thoughts, memories, emotions and impulses – connections that have always been there, but operating outside of your relatively limited awareness – in a way that prevents your mind and body from going out of control without you knowing why. In short, while you have no say over the initial conditioned responses that you have, once you're aware of them and not judging them, you can have a lot of influence over what happens next.
http://www.jimhopper.com/mindfulness
