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Posts from the ‘Deeper Mindfulness’ Category

Jul 10

Meditation Becoming Difficult, Troubling or Challenging? Here’s What to Do

Practicing mindfulness meditation can sometimes feel like a surprisingly frustrating experience. It can be especially painful when you have been practising meditation for a while – and you feel that you are finally dealing with your most difficult emotions – only to find yourself getting very sad, anxious or angry once again. For some, it can feel as if the meditation itself is making things more intense. Difficult moods, and the memories, daydreams, plans or worries that come along with them, can assail the mind as if from nowhere. It can happen to anyone, but it is more likely to occur if you have suffered difficult and traumatic events in the past. Sometimes the feelings evaporate as quickly as they arrive while at other times they stick around, almost as if they have taken up residence in the mind and refuse to leave. From time to time, people who follow a course based on one of our bestselling books Mindfulness or Deeper Mindfulness will ask us how to deal with such difficulties. So before you embark (or continue) with your practice, it is important to know what you can do when such challenges arise, both in meditation but also in daily life.

  • Firstly, it’s useful to remind yourself that we all differ in what we most need to cope with life, to live with ease, presence and kindness in the midst of our chaotic world. And each of us copes in different ways at different times in our lives. A good mindfulness course, or teacher (or one of our books) will offer a range of ways to help you on these occasions and it is worth experimenting to see what is most helpful for you.
  • Secondly, it’s important to practice mindfulness at a pace or intensity that feels right for you. The practice of mindfulness involves becoming aware of the full range of your experiences. It undoubt­edly opens your eyes to the beauties and pleasures of everyday life, many of which you may have forgotten, but it can also put you in close contact with some of your most difficult thoughts, feelings, emotions and impulses. Learning to respond wisely to these moments is central to all mindfulness courses. But what is often forgotten is that it takes time – a period of allowing that cannot be rushed through or ignored. Always try to remember, therefore, that it’s perfectly fine to stop and start elements of your mindfulness practice as the need arises. True healing, and learning, will often occur in the quiet moments between practices, so don’t feel that these periods are wasted or that you are in some way ‘giving up’. Learning to pause can be a valuable lesson in itself. Here are some specific things to look out for and ideas that you may find helpful.1

Sudden storms

Difficulties can arise at any moment of the day or night, not only while meditating, and they can feel overwhelming. When this happens, see if it’s possible to be very gentle with yourself. Perhaps in that very moment, taking a few deeper breaths and allowing your attention to drop to your feet on each out-breath. In such moments, the Six Second Stress Reliever (see, below) can be particularly helpful.2 As you focus on your feet, explore the sensations of contact between the feet and whatever is supporting them. This helps you to find ‘solid ground’ from which you are better able to make a choice about what to do next.

The Six-second Stress Reliever: Soles of the Feet Meditation3

Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and slowly and gently draw in a long, slow, breath.

Breathe out slowly, naturally and, as you do so, drop your attention to the soles of the feet.

Pay attention to all the different sensations as they rise and fall like waves on the sea. You might notice a feeling of pressure under the heels and the balls of the toes, maybe a generalised achiness or tingling all over your feet or, perhaps, patches of warmth, coldness or maybe a sense of moistness between the toes. You might not experience anything at all, so try not to pre-judge what you will find.

You can do this exercise over one breath – but more will be better.

How can something so simple be so powerful?

When you switch attention away from your churning mind and towards the sensations in your body (such as your feet), you are not just changing what fills your mind, but the whole mode of mind: you are shifting away from thinking mode to sensing mode (from Driven to Being mode). Driven mode (used during rational critical thinking) is great at solving problems – let’s not criticise it – but its main way of attempting to solve problems is to use its ability to do mental time travel: ‘hurrying on to a receding future . . . hankering after an imagined past’ in the words of poet R. S. Thomas.4 If you get stuck in a thinking loop, then more thinking won’t help you break free. Instead, it will tend to dredge up more bad memories and dangerous and imagined futures. This creates anxiety, stress, and unhappiness and also burns up lots of energy. If, instead, you switch away from the whole Driven mode, you also switch away from your troubles. Focusing on sensations does this because they can only occur only in the present moment.

Another way of entering the Being (or sensing) mode during difficult times is by expanding the ‘zoom lens’ of your attention to encompass your whole body, allowing the difficulty to be held in a much larger space with the breath in the back­ground. In such moments, try to remember that it’s also perfectly fine to move your attention away from the body to things around you. You could intentionally look around and maybe name the objects that you see such as ‘chair’, ‘rug’ or ‘picture’, or you could just focus on the sounds around you.

Difficulty when meditating

Upsets can also arise when you are actually meditating, especially when something troubling has recently happened to you, or reminds you of a past hurt. It may feel like these troubles have been reactivated by the meditation itself, or you may perhaps feel disappointed because the meditation was different to the simple relaxation that you were seeking. In such times, it’s good to remember that you have choices. There is no need to grit your teeth and continue meditating through extreme mental or physical discomfort. The aim of meditation is not to ‘harden your heart’, so that you disconnect and no longer feel fully alive or able to embrace life. Rather, you are training the mind to deal skilfully and tenderly with what troubles you. In these times, it’s helpful to distinguish between your willingness and capacity.5 So when a difficulty arises, you could try making a choice as to whether or not you are willing to stay a little longer to work with it. But even if you are willing, is this the kindest thing to do? Gently ask yourself: Do I have the capacity, the energy, right now? If you’re too tired or upset, it’s fine to leave the difficulty on one side for a while, until you feel more able to work with it. If you don’t want to set it aside completely, try choosing how close you want to move towards it, perhaps staying just on the edges, or seeing it a little way off in the distance, or perhaps broadening your field of awareness to your whole body so that it feels as though the difficulty is being held in a wider space. You could also try setting a time limit on how long you are willing to stay with it – say, five or ten breaths.

Whatever happens during your practice, always try to remem­ber that in the midst of difficulty it can feel as if you are truly alone; but you are not. Countless people have experienced the same difficulties as you and they will wish to help. If you find yourself struggling, gently pause for a while, then reach out to like-minded people either over the Internet or in real life. You may find the advice of an experienced meditation teacher to be helpful too. And remember that you can always reach out to a qualified medical or psychological treatment practitioner if your experi­ences become too difficult for you.

In this way, by exploring a range of options, you are finding new and flexible ways to respond wisely to the ups and downs of life. In being flexible, nothing of what you have learned from your past meditation practice is lost, but much is added that might benefit you and those around you.

For all these reasons and more, the first thing we teach in the course (or plan) in our latest book Deeper Mindfulness is how to steady and ground yourself. This will give you a ‘place to stand’, a vantage point from which you can explore the moment-by-moment unfolding of your experience. You can listen to the Finding Your Ground Meditation here.

More articles and blogs here:

What is mindfulness?

What it can do for you

NEW BOOK: Buy now from Amazon UK

NEW BOOK: Buy now from Amazon US

Free meditations from our 2-million selling ‘Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World’

Download Chapter One of our new book Deeper Mindfulness for free (the US & UK versions are the same apart from the cover)

  1. We are grateful to David Treleaven for his advice on this section, and for his 2018 book Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing (W. W. Norton). ↩︎
  2. Singh, N. N., Singh, J., Singh, A. D. A., Singh, A. N. A. & Winton, A. S. W. (2011), ‘Meditation on the soles of the feet for anger management: A trainer’s manual’, Raleigh, NC: Fernleaf (www.fernleafpub.com). In our Oxford Mindfulness Centre’s work in prisons, we have found that inmates appreciate a simple way of dealing with moods when things get too stressful, especially when they are about to get into arguments or fights. ↩︎
  3. Psychologist Nirbhay Singh pioneered this field and has taught the ‘Soles of the Feet’ technique successfully to school students: Selver, J. C. & Singh, N. N. Mindfulness in the Classroom: An evidence-based program to reduce disruptive behavior and increase academic engagement (Oakland, CA, New Harbinger, 2020); for  adolescents with autism: Singh, N. N., Lancioni,G. E., Manikam, R., Winton, A. S. W., Singh, A. N. A., Singh, J. &   Singh, A. D. A (2011) ‘A mindfulness-based strategy self-management of aggressive behavior in adolescents with autism’, Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 5, pp. 1153–8; adults with learning difficulties: Singh, N. N., Lancioni, G. E., Winton, A. S. W., Adkins, A. D., Singh, J. & Singh, A. N. (2007), ‘Mindfulness training assists individuals with moderate mental retardation to maintain their community placements’, Behavior Modification, 31, pp. 800–14; and older adults with Alzheimer’s Disease: Singh, N.N., Lancioni, G. E., Medvedev, O. N., Sreenivas, S., Myers, R. E. & Hwang, Y. (2018), ‘Meditation on the Soles of the Feet Practice Provides Some Control of Aggression for Individuals with Alzheimer’s Disease’, Mindfulness, published online Dec 2018, doi: 10.1007/s12671-018-1075-0; the Mindfulness in Schools Program uses a similar approach, inviting students to take a moment to feel their feet on the floor and their buttocks on the chair. The students named it FOFBOC (feet on floor, butt on chair); see www.mindfulnessinschools.org ↩︎
  4. R. S. Thomas, ‘The Bright Field’, Collected Poems (Phoenix, 1993, p.302). ↩︎
  5. We are grateful to Willoughby Britton for this distinction (International Conference on Mindfulness, Amsterdam, 13 July 2018). ↩︎

Jul 3

Is Mindfulness Risky or Even Dangerous?

From time to time, stories appear in the media about the supposed dangers of meditation. It is a legitimate area of concern. Nobody teaches meditation with the aim of hurting their clients but are they doing so unwittingly? Research indicates that mindfulness can, rarely, enhance existing unpleasant states of mind but, overall, it is a very powerful way of treating anxiety, stress, depression and exhaustion. In fact, numerous clinical trials show that it is at least as powerful as medicine or therapy for treating these conditions.

In psychology, there is an old adage that a treatment with no side effects is inert. Indeed, between three and ten per cent of people undergoing any psychological treatment may find that they feel worse afterwards than they did before they started[1]. Active ingredi­ents make a difference, and sometimes the results won’t be pleasant. Newspaper columnist Oliver Burkeman expressed it by saying that if you are using a hammer with enough strength to drive a nail into a wall, then if you hit your thumb, it will hurt.

In our experience, meditating can very occasionally make people feel worse in two contexts. The first is when a difficult or traumatic memory pops into the mind during meditation and it begins to feel overwhelming. If this happens, it is important to acknowledge it, to open your eyes and reground yourself, and perhaps even pause the practice for a while. The second is when someone has gained so much from their mindfulness practice that they start to practise too much, sometimes for several hours a day, and then find themselves ‘crashing’. The same advice applies: let it go for a while, seeking help from a meditation teacher if you need to.

Meditation, in common with many other psychological approaches works, at least in part, by encouraging practitioners to approach their difficulties. Sometimes this will not be pleasant, which is why in our books we emphasise the importance of progressing at your own pace. If a state of mind starts to become too unpleasant, then it is important to stop until you once again feel comfortable with your practice. The aim of mindfulness is to heal your most unpleasant states of mind, not to punish yourself. There really is never a need to rush through your practice, to grin and bear it, to bulldoze your way to recovery. Kindness and gentility are paramount.

Some meditations may encourage you to gently approach your most difficult states of mind. If that becomes too uncomfortable then you should simply stop, be kind to yourself, and return to your practice when you feel comfortable doing so. This pause in your practice may only be for a few moments or perhaps for a number of minutes, or days, or perhaps far longer. This will often be a delicate balancing act between the need to approach a difficult state of mind while not being overwhelmed by it. It takes practice; there is never a rush.

If you still find a particular practice overwhelming, then perhaps you should try a different meditation with the guidance of a trained teacher or counsellor. We cannot emphasis enough the importance of kindness in your practice – kindness to yourself – and this includes giving yourself permission to pause your practice or even to stop it entirely.       

A small minority of people who ignore this advice can enhance their suffering but it tends to arise in two scenarios. The first is when their existing suffering becomes so intense that they seek help in a meditation retreat or on an intensive course. Neither of these are ideal for beginners. Retreats can be very austere places dedicated to intensive practice, and are often not ideal for beginners, especially ones with pre-existing conditions, unless the courses have been specifically designed for them. However, meditation teachers in such retreats or those leading mindfulness courses will normally carry out a thorough psychological assessment of prospective clients. The idea is to identify those who may experience an adverse reaction and to then refer them on to an experienced psychologist or on to a more appropriate course. This minimises the potential for harm.

An ideal way to learn mindfulness is on an accredited course, most of which use our books Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World. Follow-on courses often use our book Deeper Mindfulness: The New Way to Rediscover Calm in a Chaotic World. Both books have been proven to work in clinical trials carried out at Oxford University and other institutions around the world. And crucially, both were designed for home use and were only later adopted for use on meditation courses.

Mindfulness can be seen as analogous to physical fitness training, which can sometimes injure you – especially if you overdo it when your body is unused to it, but also even when you have taken every precaution or are very experienced. You do not then conclude, however, that physical fitness and exercise are bad for you – rather, that you simply need to pace yourself. The same is true for mindfulness meditation.

And finally, it is important to remember that mindfulness is not an extreme sport. To the best of our knowledge, nobody has been killed or seriously injured whilst sitting on a cushion, meditating.

What is Mindfulness?

What it can do for you

NEW BOOK: Buy now from Amazon UK

NEW BOOK: Buy now from Amazon US

Free meditations from our 2-million selling ‘Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World’

Download Chapter One of our new book Deeper Mindfulness for free (the US & UK versions are the same apart from the cover)

[1] Baer, R., Crane, C., Miller, E., & Kuyken, W. (2019). Doing no harm in mindfulness-based programs: Conceptual issues and empirical findings. Clinical psychology review, 71, 101–114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2019.01.001

Nov 23

A Major Cause Of Mental Ill-Health Has Been Discovered And So Has A Powerful New Treatment

In the Matrix movies, there are those who famously opt to take the ‘red-pill’ and discover that they are living inside a computer simulation of the world, while those who take the ‘blue-pill’ continue to live in blissful ignorance. Hollywood hyperbole aside, could the Matrix really contain a glimmer of truth? In recent years, neuroscientists have started to believe that we do indeed live inside a simulation, albeit one created by the brain rather than an alien computer. And this has profound implications for our understanding of the origins of thoughts, feelings and emotions but also for many mental health problems too.  

The New Psychology of the Mind: Predictive Processing

It takes an enormous amount of mental energy to become con­scious of the present moment. This is because of the vast amount of information flowing in from our senses, all of it needing to be co-ordinated and integrated so that we can become not only conscious of the world but also make decisions and act upon them – in real time – in the present moment. Given the complex­ity of the task, you would expect this to make everything – from walking along a crowded street to such simple things as catching a ball – extremely difficult. But nature has got around the problem by giving us a brain that predicts the future. It constructs a ‘simplified’ model of the world that is constantly updated and enriched by information from our senses. What we regard as the present moment is actually a stunningly realistic illusion created by the mind. An illusion so compelling that we mistake it for reality. It is called a simulation and the process it relies upon is known as ‘predictive process­ing’[i].

Predictive processing works by constantly ‘guessing’ what information the senses are about to send to the brain. We do not truly see the world; we see what our minds think the world is about to look like. Nor do we truly hear, but instead experience the sounds that the mind believes are about to hit our ears. And the same is true for our other senses, too. The mind predicts what we are about to taste, feel and smell. And in practice, it is this prediction – or simulation – that we experience, rather than the ‘real’ world.

As you can imagine, this is a fantastically complex process, but a simple analogy helps: if you are talking about politics in the UK and someone mentions the Houses of P . . . you can guess what’s coming next (the word ‘Parliament’). Because you have predicted the word, you don’t need to listen to the word itself. You can instead use that moment to capture the meaning of the whole sentence. Such predictions make perception and responses more fluent because the world is normally predict­able. As explained above, we don’t create a prediction for one single sense but for all of them. Simultaneously. We construct a global model that incorporates sights, sounds, smells, tastes and sensations. This model is constantly updated, moment by moment, and incorporates any deviations from the real external ‘reality’; we move through the world creating and updating – pre­dicting and checking – it. And if our checks show that we have made an error (like when we approach a door and pull on the large handle rather than pushing on it), we simply begin to pay more attention to the actual stream of data arriving from our senses. Any necessary corrections are then built into the model.

The brain also stores core experiences ready for re-use in the simulation. Imagine you are walking through your local park on a lovely sunny day. You have been to the park countless times before, and know it in detail. You have seen the sun filtering through the leaves of the trees many times; you know how the grass looks and smells, the sounds made by the children on the swings, the dogs barking and the traffic in the distance. You know everything you need to know about the park in order to reconstruct a highly accurate simulation of it in your mind. And if there are a few gaps – well, the mind is perfectly capable of filling them in and constructing a seamless experience.

States of Distress Are Also Ones of Hope

It’s not just visits to a lovely park that are recalled from memory to prime your simulation. Distressing thoughts, feelings and emotions are, too. In fact, troublesome states of mind are the easiest to recall. This is because the mind tends to store the most salient experiences on a hair-trigger (along with your most potent thoughts, feel­ings and emotions). So in practice, the things most likely to be re-experienced in your simulation are the most negative ones. Such dark and amorphous emotions as anxiety, stress, anger and unhappiness are held at the front of the queue.

None of this means that your distress is exaggerated or untrue. If you feel sad, then you are sad. If you feel anxious, stressed, exhausted or angry, then you truly are experiencing such distress. Your predictions are true for you. Simulation is reality.

Painful though they are, these states of distress are also ones of hope. For they are not solid, real and unchanging. Your simulation can be ‘re-calibrated’ to better reflect reality. And you can do this using an ancient type of mindfulness known as vedana or feeling tone meditation (See Deeper Mindfulness: The New Way to Rediscover Calm in a Chaotic World). In these meditations, you are asked to still the mind with a simple breath or body meditation and then to focus, in a very specific way, on the feelings and sensations that arise in the moment that the unconscious mind crystallises into the conscious one. In this way, your simulation is progressively recalibrated and brought into closer alignment with reality. So you learn to experience the world as it truly is rather than one recreated from your darkest memories or deepest fears. Feeling Tone meditations progressively release the grip that such distressing states of mind hold over you. You come to realise that yes, sometimes life can be painful, but at other times it is glorious, too. So you come to experience life as an ever-flowing series of pleasant and unpleasant moments. Moments of keen reality. And it is in such moments, that you can genuinely start to live again.

And research is beginning to show that an eight week program based on these feeling tone meditations can be a highly effective treatment for anxiety, stress, and depression while also enhancing overall wellbeing.[ii] It might not be necessary to take a Red Pill to break free of a distressing simulation. Feeling tone meditations may be enough.

You can download/stream some Feeling Tone meditations HERE.

Buy Deeper Mindfulness: The New Way to Rediscover Calm in a Chaotic World from Amazon UK

Buy Deeper Mindfulness from Amazon US

Download Chapter One for free (the US & UK versions are the same apart from the cover)

[i] For a review of this approach, see Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University Press, 2016), Lawrence Barsalou (2008), ‘Grounded cognition’, Annual Review of Psychology, 59, pp. 617–45 and Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Pan Books, 2017) and Manjaly, Z. M. & Iglesias, S. (2020), ‘A computational theory of mindfulness based cognitive therapy from the “Bayesian brain” perspective’, Frontiers in Psychiatry, 11, p. 404.

[ii] Williams, J.M.G., Baer, R., Batchelor, M. et al. What Next After MBSR/MBCT? An Open Trial of an 8-Week Follow-on Program Exploring Mindfulness of Feeling Tone (vedanā). Mindfulness 13, 1931–1944 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-022-01929-0