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Mindfulness makes you ‘tougher’ too…

Mindfulness training has been proven to help relieve anxiety, stress and depression whilst boosting intelligence and creative thinking. It also enhances feelings of compassion and empathy. Some have claimed that these changes can make us ‘better people’. Obviously this is all good news, but it’s also necessary to have a degree of ‘toughness’ (we prefer the term ‘resilience’) to withstand life’s knocks and kick-backs.

Can Mindfulness help with this too? Or will regular meditation make you ‘too’ nice?

There’s good news on this front. Mindfulness has been found to boost resilience to quite a remarkable degree. Hardiness varies hugely from person to person. Some people thrive on stressful challenges that may daunt many others, whether these involve meeting ever-increasing work performance targets, trekking to the South Pole or being able to cope with three kids, a stressful job and mortgage payments.

What is it that makes ‘hardy’ people able to cope where others might wilt? Dr Suzanne Kobasa at City University of New York narrowed the field down to three psychological traits which she termed control, commitment and challenge. Another eminent psychologist, Dr Aaron Antonovsky, an Israeli medical sociologist, has also attempted to pin down the key psychological traits that allowed some to withstand extreme stress while others did not. He focused on Holocaust survivors and narrowed the search down to three traits which together add to having a sense of coherence: comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness. So ‘hardy’ people have a belief that their situation has inherent meaning that they can commit themselves to, that they can manage their life, and that their situation is understandable – that it is basically comprehensible, even if it seems chaotic and out of control.

To a large degree, all of the traits identified by both Kobasa and Antonovsky govern how resilient we are. Generally speaking, the higher you score on their scales the more able you are to cope with life’s trials and tribulations.

As part of their ongoing evaluation of the impact of their eight-week mindfulness training course, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s team at the University of Massachusetts Medical School decided to see whether meditation could boost these scores and thereby enhance hardiness. And the results were very clear cut indeed. In general, not only did the participants feel happier, more energised and less stressed, they also felt that they had far more control over their lives. They found that their lives had more meaning and that challenges should be seen as opportunities rather than threats. Other studies have replicated this finding.

But perhaps most intriguing of all is the realisation that these ‘fundamental’ character traits are not unchangeable after all. They can be changed for the better by just eight weeks of mindfulness training. And these transformations should not be underestimated because they can have huge significance for our day-to-day lives. While empathy, compassion and inner serenity are vital for overall wellbeing, a certain degree of hardiness is required too. And the cultivation of mindfulness can have a dramatic impact on these crucial aspects of our lives.

Overall ‘hardiness’ can be boosted by following the eight-week Mindfulness programme in the book: ‘Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World’ by Professor Mark Williams and Dr Danny Penman.

Meditating on a piece of chocolate – what could be better?

Wednesday 8^th June 2011

Today was one of those day’s where I just needed some chocolate. You know that feeling! Rather than wolfing it down, I thought I’d run through our ‘Chocolate Meditation’. This has often been imitated by other teachers – and we’re glad that we’re adding to the sum of Mindfulness knowledge.

In the interests of full disclosure, my PhD was focused on the biochemistry of a disease of South American cocoa crops and was funded by the chocolate industry. And yes, I did get free chocolate from time to time! Gorgeous stuff too….

The chocolate meditation

Choose some chocolate – either a type that you’ve never tried before or one that you have not eaten recently. It might be dark and flavoursome, organic or fair-trade or, perhaps, cheap and trashy. The important thing is to choose a type you wouldn’t normally eat or that you consume only rarely. Here goes:

• Open the packet. Inhale the aroma. Let it sweep over you.
• Break off a piece and look at it. Really let your eyes drink in what it looks like, examining every nook and cranny.
• Pop it in your mouth. See if it’s possible to hold it on your tongue and let it melt, noticing any tendency to suck at it. Chocolate has over 300 different flavours. See if you can sense some of them.
• If you notice your mind wandering while you do this, simply notice where it went, then gently escort it back to the present moment.
• After the chocolate has completely melted, swallow it very slowly and deliberately. Let it trickle down your throat.
• Repeat this with one other piece.

How do you feel? Is it different from normal? Did the chocolate taste better than if you’d just eaten it at a normal breakneck pace?

This meditation can be found in our book ‘Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World’ by Professor Mark Williams and Dr Danny Penman. The book comes with a free CD of guided meditations based upon Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, which was co-developed by Mark at Oxford University.

When meditation becomes difficult

Sometimes meditation can be surprisingly difficult. I was reminded of this today. My mind would not be still. It kept on leaping around, chasing it’s own tail, following thought-stream after thought-stream…. until I realised, once again, that my concentration had lapsed. When you have days such as this, it pays to remember that in many ways the meditation is the moment when you realise that your mind has wandered. That’s the moment when you suddenly realise, deep down, that conscious awareness is different from thinking. Your thoughts are not you. This realisation may only last for a few seconds before your mind once again races off like a greyhound after a hare. But still, these can often be a very valuable few seconds.

So the next time you have a difficult meditation, try to inwardly smile at yourself and acknowledge that you’ve just discovered something very valuable indeed. You can then continue where you left off….

Mindfulness is happiness

A wonderful interview with Professor Mark Williams has just appeared in South Africa’s WealthWise Magazine. You can read it on their website here.

In the interview Mark explains that Mindfulness is, at its core, simply observation without criticism. It is seeing the world as it is, not how you want it to be, or through the distorting lens of your emotions.

Mark says: “The methods used to cultivate mindfulness were first recorded over two thousand years ago. It has long been central to wisdom traditions in Asia, particularly the Buddhist tradition, but the art of cultivating inner silence has been a central part of all religious traditions across the ages.

“Mindfulness meditation is a secular form of this tradition that anyone can learn. It trains us to pay deliberate attention to our experience, both external and internal. We learn to focus on what is happening from moment to moment with full intention and without judgment. Mindfulness is the awareness that emerges through such training, and the skill of developing and sustaining that awareness.

“In the UK, the NHS’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has recommended Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) as a cost-effective treatment for preventing relapse in depression.

“Other research has found that MBCT reduces anxiety in people suffering from General Anxiety and Bipolar Disorders, and can help enhance the quality of life and reduce the stress in those with a diagnosis of cancer.”

Mark also makes the important point that Mindfulness training doesn’t just help with clinical level anxiety, stress and depression but with the normal problems that we all face on a daily basis.

Mark says: “The remarkable thing about mindfulness training is that the very same practices that help to release us from negative emotions also enhance positive emotions and well-being.  This is because mindfulness teaches us to be less ‘in our heads’ and more in our bodies and present to what is happening around us.  We become more aware of the sights, sounds, and tastes that we normally take for granted, so there comes a sense of reconnecting with life, and reclaiming a way of living that expresses our deepest values, rather than postponing peace and happiness for another day.”

Our book: Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World is available from bookshops nationwide (and from Amazon, of course). It will be published in the USA in October by Rodale with the title: Mindfulness: An Eight Week Plan For Finding Peace in a Frantic World.

My broken leg healed in half the time… all because I meditated

The Daily Mail has just published my article on how Mindfulness meditation helped me cope with the mental and physical pain of a horrific flying accident five years ago.

By Danny Penman

Meditation is often touted as a panacea for all manner of ailments, from chronic pain to anxiety, stress and even depression.

Like most sensible people, I’d always taken such sweeping claims with a large pinch of salt. However, five years ago I learned the power of meditation for myself after an accident left me critically injured and in constant pain.

A freak gust of wind caught me off-guard as I was paragliding over the Cotswolds. One moment my paraglider was flying normally, the next its wing had collapsed, sending me tumbling into the hillside 30ft below.

I was struck with the most agonising pain imaginable. The bone in the lower half of my right leg had been driven up through my knee and into my thigh. I could see the outline of my fractured shin bone sticking through the cloth of my jeans. I went into shock and my body was racked with violent uncontrollable spasms.

As I lay on the hillside, I remembered a form of meditation I’d been taught in the sixth form of my comprehensive school in Neston, Cheshire, as a way of tackling exam nerves.

Over the years I’d used it to deal with the usual stresses and strains of daily life, but never in times of physical pain. But I knew that meditation (and self-hypnosis) had been used for pain relief and, as I lay on the hillside, in sheer desperation I tried them both.

I forced myself to breathe slowly and deeply, to focus on the sensations the breath made as it flowed in and out. I pictured myself in a beautiful garden and imagined myself inhaling its peaceful and tranquil air.

Gradually, breath by breath, the pain became more distant. It felt less ‘personal’, almost as if I was watching it on TV.

In hospital it became apparent how seriously injured I was — and just how effective a painkiller the meditation had been.

My leg was so badly broken that I would need three major operations. I also needed a newly invented device, a Taylor Spatial Frame, to be surgically attached to my leg for up to 18 months to repair the damage. Consisting of four equally spaced rings that encircled my lower leg, the frame looked like a cross between a Meccano set and a medieval torture device.

Fourteen metal spokes and two bolts connected these rings to the shards of bone inside my leg, and allowed the surgeon to move the fragments around inside.

Life with the frame was intolerable. Sleep was virtually impossible, and the pain was controlled with powerful drugs that left me washed-out and jaded.

I felt thoroughly wretched — anxious, irritable and highly stressed. So I decided to find an alternative way of coping with the pain and of maximising my chances of recovery.

I discovered the work of Mark Williams, professor of clinical psychology at Oxford University. He and his colleagues at the universities of Cambridge, Toronto, and Massachusetts had spent 20 years studying the phenomenal power of meditation for treating anxiety and even full-blown depression.

They had turned it into a therapy known as Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) that was gaining the support of doctors and scientists. It had even been endorsed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and in Britain by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice).

One study, in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, has shown that it brings about long-term changes in levels of happiness and well-being, while a major study in Psychological Science revealed such changes help regular meditators live longer, healthier lives. It’s also been shown to be as effective as drugs for treating depression. In fact, it’s now one of the preferred treatments recommended by Nice.

A typical meditation session consists of focusing on breathing and the sensations it creates. This reduces the levels of stress hormones in the body which, in turn, enhances healing and boosts physical health.

It helps partly by teaching you to live in the present moment rather than worrying too much about the past or the future.

Faced with the evidence, I decided to try mindfulness meditation. I began each day with a ten-minute breathing meditation to calm the mind. At bedtime, I would meditate for 30 minutes while visualising a warm, white, healing light sweeping up and down my leg.

This simple meditation programme worked to an astonishing degree. My pain gradually subsided and I slashed my intake of painkillers by two-thirds. I also developed a more contented outlook, seeing my injuries as temporary problems that would gradually subside rather than as limb-threatening ones that might confine me to a wheelchair.

The MBCT is, I’m convinced, why I recovered in double-quick time: the leg frame was removed after just 17 weeks rather than the normal six to 18 months.

My progress astonished my doctors. Just after the final operation I joked with my surgeon that maybe my injuries hadn’t been as bad as I’d thought. He looked at me aghast and said: ‘Your leg was in the Top Five leg injuries I’ve treated with a Taylor Spatial Frame — and possibly higher.’

I still meditate for 30 minutes each day. So convinced am I by its benefits that I’ve written a book, with Professor Williams, that teaches mindfulness meditation.

And my recovery continues apace. Two years ago, at the age of 42, I took up running, and I’m currently hiking the 630-mile South West Coast Path in 50-mile sections. Given the severity of my injuries, that’s astonishing.

Click here for a 3 minute free meditation practice

Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World, by Professor Mark Williams and Dr Danny Penman, is published by Piatkus.

Daily Mail article HERE

More research extolling the virtues of Mindfulness

Just a quick post today as I’ve been busy (almost frantic, but not quite!) dealing with media enquiries about the book….

Quite a lot of scientific work has been published over the past few hours about the benefits of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for a variety of conditions. It seems Mindfulness is good for Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)

Other research shows (not unexpectedly) that it’s great for anxiety and depression as well. Although we already knew this, it’s all grist to the mill.

Danny wins another prestigious journalism award

I’ve just learned that I’ve won this year’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) ‘Special Investigation Award’. It’s for my investigation into Halal slaughter in the UK for the Daily Mail newspaper (you can read about it here).

For those of you who don’t know, Halal slaughter involves cutting an animal’s throat while it is still fully conscious. It is, apparently, important in Islam that an animal be fully aware of its own death so that it can hear the prayers of the Imam. Well, that’s the official line anyway. In fact, Mohammed meant Halal slaughter to be an improvement over the existing norms that were around in the Arabian Peninsula 1400 years ago. His aim was to reduce cruelty as far as possible. This fact seems to be lost on some.

I spent six weeks secretly ‘infiltrating’ the slaughterhouse during which I needed every inch of my Mindfulness training. One slip up and I would have been in a great deal of trouble indeed! It was such a horrific story to cover that I needed to spend extra time meditating each day to stop myself feeling chronically cynical and downright miserable. I hate cruelty in all of it’s forms so watching such barbarism right in front of my eyes was very tough indeed. Again, Mindfulness helped me cope.

The RSPCA award is presented in September. It follows hot on the heels of the Humane Society of the United States’ Brigitte Bardot Print Journalism Award that I received in Hollywood in March. It’s been a good year so far! The awarding committee included 100 showbiz folk such as “Twilight” star Peter Facinelli, Sheryl Crow, Ellen DeGeneres, Harrison Ford, Moby, and Viggo Mortensen. And yes, I did have a great time!

Here’s the story.

Publication day (what is Mindfulness anyway?)

Publication day and Amazon can’t meet demand….

We are often asked ‘what is Mindfulness meditation?’ I became so wrapped up in thinking about the best way of expressing the answer that I became completely unmindful. My thoughts took on a life of their own, hopping from one thought chain to the next, and the next, and the next…. After a while I realised that I’d just burnt the bread I’d put in the oven twenty minutes previously…. My autopilot had seized control again! Four hours of mixing, kneading and proving gone to waste. Except it hadn’t gone to waste because it brought home to me (again) just how clever the mind is. It wants to think and it will always find a way of doing so. This is marvelous, most of the time.

Sometimes we need to focus our mind on just one thing – or to be fully aware of our mind in action. In essence this is what Mindfulness is – full and pure awareness of how our minds work. It’s a space in which to watch and sense the mind and body. To hold it in a space that’s greater than thinking, wiser than thinking.

I love thinking, but sometimes it’s good to just pause for a while and instead become fully conscious and aware. It’s a different state of being. Not better or worse, just different.

I’m off now to bake another loaf from some dough from the freezer. Baking shall be my meditation for today. I shall be fully aware of the aroma as the bread begins to bake. Smell it as it swirls through my nostrils and into my lungs. Perhaps I’ll hear little popping sounds as the trays in the oven begin to expand with heat. Or maybe I’ll hear nothing at all.

Life could be like a box of chocolates

Mindfulness therapy fights stress and depression by teaching you how to ‘own’ the present, says Genevieve Fox of the Daily Telegraph.

Genevieve recently spent a day with Mark Williams to discover some of the meditations at the heart of Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World. She especially loved our ‘Chocolate Meditation’ (see below).

By Genevieve Fox 7:00AM BST 02 May 2011-05-02

Mindfulness is hip. It’s as trendy as yoga or zone-eating. No surprises, then, that when I enter the Oxford Mindfulness Centre (OMC), I see dawn-red soft furnishings, green plants, rubber mats and kneeling stools. Wellbeing gurus would feel right at home.

So would chocolate lovers. Mark Williams, clinical psychologist and the Centre’s director, suggests the best way to understand mindfulness is to try it and invites me to join him in a “chocolate meditation”.

Mindfulness, he says, is about being present in the moment, being aware of our thoughts and feelings – so that instead of being overwhelmed by them we are better able to manage them. Using meditation and other techniques such as breathing and yoga-based exercises, it helps us think about ourselves, and in turn others, with kindness and an overriding sense of acceptance. It’s about finding our innate joie de vivre and feeling able to cope just when we think we’re going under. It’s as irresistible as chocolate.

Prof Williams has created a series of mindfulness meditations, designed to steer us to an inner place of calm, no matter how frantic and demanding our lives. They form the basis of his new book on the topic, co-authored with journalist Danny Penman. The book offers an eight-week programme of exercises, supported by a CD and is aimed at anyone who feels depressed, unhappy or overwrought.

We start the chocolate meditation.… Read the rest of the article HERE:

Time management using Mindfulness meditation

Although it’s still two weeks to publication, Best Magazine asked me to give them a little sneak preview of our book.

They loved the idea of finding peace in a frantic world using Mindfulness meditation and asked me to write a short piece on ‘mindful time management’. This was more difficult than it sounds. Although Mindfulness meditation isn’t complex, some of the concepts can be very subtle and tricky to get across in just 300 words.

Still, this is what I wrote for Best (it was published a couple of days ago). Hopefully the readers found it useful enough to consider taking up Mindfulness meditation.

If you find it useful, please consider Tweeting about it.

How to manage your time

When you’re really up against the wall and time is slipping through your fingers, get everything back on track by grabbing a moment for yourself. Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Feel the air as it swirls through your nose and gently fills your lungs. Feel it once again as it flows out.

The secret of time management is accepting that you’ll never have enough of it. There’s always too much to do and you’ll never be able to achieve everything you want. So, prioritise.

The second secret is the humble ‘To Do’ list. Never write down more than half a dozen points. And when you cross them off, try to do it mindfully by feeling the satisfaction as it flows through your body.

Avoid being side-tracked by ‘Time Stealers’ such as emails, Facebook posts and tweets by only checking your accounts two or three times a day. Time Stealers trigger endless streams of thoughts. Before you know it, half the morning’s gone.

Become fully aware of the gaps in the day. It’s easy to mindlessly rush from one thing to the next, and then the next… and not notice the gaps in between. The mind often fills these spaces with stress and anxiety. And before you know it, you’ve been side-tracked again.

Instead, use the gaps to cultivate mindful awareness. Pay full attention to the beauty (or ugliness) of the world around you. Or try savouring a cup of coffee and a piece of cake. Focus on every single taste, aroma, and sensation. Mindfulness can be enjoyable as well as productive!

Three Step Solution

1) Use ‘Mindfulness Bells’. These remind you to snap back into full awareness and can include putting on make-up, chopping vegetables or standing in a queue. Do these mindfully by paying full attention to sights, smells, sounds and sensations.

2) Meditate. Mindfulness meditation can help liberate you from the pressures of time. This is partly because it helps you deal with tasks more skillfully and creatively. It makes you happier, less stressed and anxious too.

3) Make a start. Research has shown that when people are stressed then the motivation to do something arrives after they’ve begun a task. So make a start, and then you’ll discover the impetus to carry on.