Mindfulness in Eight Weeks: The revolutionary 8 week plan to clear your mind and calm your life

What Exactly Do We Mean by Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is not the same thing as meditation. Meditation, especially ‘mindfulness meditation’, is a method of practice whose outcome is intended to be greater mindfulness.

Mindfulness is the quality of awareness that comes from paying attention to yourself, others and the world around you in a certain way. Jon Kabat-Zinn (of whom more later) speaks of it as the awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgementally.

Let’s look at that in more detail.

Mindfulness Involves Paying Attention on Purpose

The act of choosing to pay attention is rarer than you might at first think. Even as you’re reading these words, how attentive are you? For most of us, the act of reading is fairly automatic. An impulse moves us to pick up a book, we open it, begin to read ... and all the while our attention flits.

This is neither right nor wrong – it’s just how we are, and even as you have read just these few pages so far, part of your mind will quite naturally have wandered off many times to engage with other things that call on your attention. Maybe part of your mind spent some time turning over a problem at work or at home. Maybe you thought for a bit about some of the tasks on your to-do list right now. Or perhaps something you read sparked a memory and an image from the past came vividly to mind. Maybe you began to think about your next meal and you ran through a quick inventory of one of your kitchen cupboards.

As I said, none of this is right or wrong. It’s just how our minds work. And when we’re mindful we bring a much clearer intentionality and awareness to the process of paying attention. When we’re mindful, we choose – to some extent at least – where our attention goes. We pay attention on purpose.

Mindfulness Involves Paying Attention in the Present Moment

Our attention wanders and much of the time it wanders off into the past or into the future. Sometimes there are elements of anxiety or regret involved in this. We may look to the future with a kind of anxious anticipation for what is to come, maintaining an uneasy alertness by constantly scanning the future for the challenges it may bring: encounters with other people we must prepare for, tasks we need to tick off our list – stuff coming our way. Or we may find ourselves constantly reviewing the past, especially the things we regret. There might even be some unconscious sense that by doing so we’ll be better prepared for the future.

Perhaps there are evolutionary processes at work here. Maybe we’ve survived as a species and become the planet’s top predators in part because we’re good at doing these things. But there is a price for this and that price may be the whole of our lives. If your attention is always in the future or always in the past, right now you’re simply not here. Right now, you’re not fully alive.

When you’re mindful, your attention stays in the present moment. Right here, right now.

Mindfulness Is Non-Judgemental

This doesn’t mean that we don’t make judgements when we’re mindful, or that we stop discerning what is appropriate at any time from what is inappropriate. That would be simple foolishness. But think of what we mean when we speak of someone being ‘judgemental’. A thesaurus gives these synonyms: critical, hypercritical, condemnatory, negative, disapproving, disparaging, pejorative. Quite a list.

The non-judgemental attitude of mindfulness, on the other hand, is neither condemnatory nor prejudicial. There are two dimensions to this.

Firstly, there is what we might think of as a wisdom dimension. This involves letting what is the case be the case.

Much of the time we may feel, instinctively almost, unwilling or unable to do this. We can put huge amounts of mental and emotional energy into refusing to allow things to simply be as they are. ‘They shouldn’t be like that!’ ‘It shouldn’t be like this!’ ‘I ought to be somehow different ...’ But things really only ever are as they actually are. However right, however wrong, however just or unjust, desirable or undesirable – they are as they are. And it’s only ever when we can allow this to be fact – that things are as they are – that choice can begin to open up for us. When we let what is the case be the case, whatever it is, then we can begin to choose how to respond to it. What shall we do about what’s showed up right now? What would be the most appropriate next step for us and for the situation as a whole?

When we can’t let what is the case be the case, then we’re stuck. We’re already rooted in a defensive posture of denial and we’ve closed down the possibilities for a more creative engagement with the situation. The wisdom element in the non-judgemental attitude of mindfulness opens up the possibility for a more wholehearted creative response to the situations we find ourselves in. It allows for more creative choices.

Then, there is a compassion dimension to the non-judgemental attitude of mindfulness. Here, to some extent at least, we still our inner critical voice.

For much of the time, many of us find that we run a kind of inner critical commentary on our experience. Sometimes that commentary can be directed at ourselves – ‘I’m not good enough.’ ‘I don’t measure up.’

How many of us actually think we’re thin enough, good-looking enough, smart enough, fit enough, strong enough, witty enough, rich enough, clever enough, fast enough ... anything enough?

Sometimes we turn that inner critical commentary on others – on their appearance, their intelligence, their emotional appropriateness and so on. Sometimes we run critical commentaries on our immediate environment – somehow or other, in one way or another, things just aren’t right. Nothing is quite as it should be. Nothing, ourselves included, is quite enough.

The compassion element in the non-judgemental attitude of mindfulness allows us to rest simply with things as they are – at least to some extent. We allow ourselves to be ourselves, we allow others to be who they are, and we rest a little bit more at ease with life as it actually is – with a bit more kindly acceptance towards ourselves, others and the world around us.

The quality of acceptance that emerges from mindfulness training isn’t simple passivity, however. It’s not that we passively allow the world to roll over us, or that we stop making ethical judgements. Far from it. Mindfulness training might even enable you to be more appropriately assertive. It might sharpen your capacity for drawing ethical distinctions. But all of this can be done with wisdom and with kindness.

With mindfulness training you begin to develop a greater capacity to allow what is the case to be the case and to respond skilfully and appropriately with a warm open-heartedness.

Box 1: A Small Digression into History

This book is based on a completely secular approach to mindfulness training. It is for people of any religion or none. For 2,500 years, however, the ideas and practices at the core of the approach were found almost exclusively in Buddhist monasteries in Asia. So far as we’re aware, the Buddha was the first person in history to use the idea of mindfulness as we use it in contemporary mindfulness approaches. He taught a number of mindfulness practices and other methods for developing and sustaining mindfulness and he spoke at length of the immense benefits that are on offer from engaging in those practices. That approach and a body of teachings and practices that came from it lived on in a wide variety of Buddhist monastic contexts in Asia but, for 2,500 years, people outside of Asia knew almost nothing about it.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century that began to change as European explorers, scholars and colonial administrators began to discover and translate into their own contexts some of what was going on in Asian monasteries. At first, only a tiny handful of these took up the practices for themselves, and the penetration of mindfulness approaches into European and North American culture was slow and gradual. But it built steadily and received a boost in the 1950s with the emergence of the Beats – poets and writers like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, who began to publicly advocate the practice. It received more of a boost in the 1960s and 1970s with the psychedelic movement, when people like myself – hippies and wannabe hippies – began to get involved. But mindfulness practices were still largely to be found only in Buddhist contexts.

Towards the end of the 1970s, however, a very significant shift took place. Much of this comes down to Jon Kabat-Zinn. Jon had trained as a molecular biologist and was working as such at a hospital near Boston – the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Medical Center. In his student days he had come upon Buddhism and had established a regular daily meditation practice. Apart from his work at the hospital, he also taught yoga. He engaged with his scientific work, but two other questions kept bothering him. One question he expressed as ‘What shall I do with my life? What kind of work do I love so much I would pay to do it?’ The other was more to do with the patients who came to the hospital.

He saw that people came to the hospital because, in one way or another, they were suffering. But how many of them, he wondered, left the hospital with that suffering resolved? In discussion with physicians at the hospital he came to the conclusion that it was maybe something like 20 per cent of patients. What, he wondered, was the system offering to the other 80 per cent?

While on a silent meditation retreat in 1979 these two streams of questioning resolved themselves in a ‘vision’ lasting maybe 10 seconds, which Jon describes as an instantaneous seeing of vivid, almost inevitable connections and their implications.

He recognised in that moment that the way he was working on that retreat on his own mind and mental states might have enormous benefits for the people who came to the hospital with their suffering. He saw that it might be possible to share the essence of the meditation and yoga teachings that he had been practising for the past 13 years with those who might never come to a Buddhist centre, and who would never be able to discover that essence through the words and forms that were used in such places. He resolved to try to make the practices and the language used to describe them so commonsensical that anyone might benefit from them.

Jon persuaded the hospital authorities to let him and his colleagues have some space in the basement, and there they developed what soon came to be known as the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme. He and his colleagues worked to develop a contemporary vocabulary that spoke to the heart of the matter without reference to the cultural aspects of the traditions out of which those practices emerged.

Jon had trained as a scientist and knew the value of research, so he and his colleagues researched the patient outcomes of their programme and, bit by bit, what is now a very considerable body of research evidence into the efficacy of the training began to emerge. At the time of writing there are many thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers investigating the effects of mindfulness training. If you’re interested in these, you’ll find an extensive database of them at www.mindfulexperience.org (http://www.mindfulexperience.org).

It soon became clear that MBSR training enabled people to deal much better with chronic pain. They also became more adept at managing the various stressors that accompanied whatever issues had brought them to the hospital. The research indicates that the programme is successful at helping people deal with difficulty and, at the time of writing, more than 20,000 people have completed the eight-week course at UMass itself. More than 740 academic medical centres, hospitals, clinics and freestanding programmes offer MBSR to the public around the world, and interest in mindfulness training has continued to build as it has become increasingly apparent that it is not only stress and chronic pain that are positively affected when you learn to work with your attention in a different way.

Biological changes started to show up in the research as well. One early instance of this was the finding that, among patients who came to the hospital for treatment for psoriasis, the symptoms of those who engaged in the MBSR course alongside that treatment cleared up around 50 per cent faster than the symptoms of patients who didn’t. What this seemed to show was that what people were doing with their minds, the work they were doing with their attention, was actually changing their bodies.

The understanding of the way in which mindfulness training affects us biologically received a further boost when neuroscientists began to investigate its effects.

Part of this story goes back to 1992, when a small group of neuroscientists led by Professor Richard Davidson and helped by Alan Wallace, a Western Buddhist scholar, travelled to Dharamsala in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas on a kind of neuroscience expedition. They took with them an array of what was then cutting-edge scientific equipment: laptop computers, electroencephalographs, battery packs and a generator. They wanted to meet some of the Tibetan Buddhist hermit-meditators who lived in the hills above the town and they hoped to recruit from among them a cohort of expert meditators – people who had put in tens of thousands of hours of meditation practice. The neuroscientists wanted to study the pattern of their brain activity. They were particularly interested in the habits of thinking and feeling they exhibited when not meditating. If these demonstrated that the subjects had unusual habitual traits, these might reflect enduring functional changes that had occurred in their brains as a result of their mental training.

This first foray simply failed. To begin with, the yogis were unimpressed by what seemed to them to be the scientists’ uninformed and naïve perspectives on meditation. ‘We seemed like primitive Neanderthals to them,’ explained Alan Wallace, who helped to facilitate the encounters.

In the end the scientists got no usable data from that trip. But they’d made a start and, with the Dalai Lama’s help, in 2001 a number of maroon-robed Tibetan Buddhist monks began to make their way to Davidson’s Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience in Madison, Wisconsin, to meditate with EEG caps stuck on their already shaven heads. These were ‘Olympic-level athletes’ of meditation, with many years of intensive practice behind them. The results were astounding. The expert meditators exhibited patterns of brain activity never before measured by science. We’ll look in more detail at some of these findings in Week Three. They’re particularly interesting because from them scientists were encouraged to investigate what changes might show up in people who had no previous meditation experience and who took up an eight-week mindfulness training course. Here, they found (and research continues to find) highly significant changes in the patterns of brain activation – and even changes in the brain’s physical structure – that follow from just eight weeks of mindfulness training.

Box 2: Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy

A significant event in the development of secular mindfulness training came about in 1992 when three distinguished cognitive psychologists – Zindel Segal, Mark Williams and John Teasdale – were asked by the director of a clinical psychology research network to develop a group-based therapy for the treatment of relapsing depression.

Significant depression is a highly disabling condition. Besides emotional pain and anguish, people who are depressed also experience levels of functional impairment comparable to those found in major medical illnesses – including cancer and coronary heart disease – and a World Health Organization projection suggests that of all diseases depression will impose the second-largest burden of ill health worldwide by the year 2020.

Roughly one in 10 of us in Europe and North America will experience serious depression at some point in our lives. In some parts of the population that is more like one in four. What is more, when people have had three or more serious episodes of depression there is something like a 67 per cent chance that their depression will relapse.

Back in 1992, the two treatments that seemed to be most effective in treating people with relapsing depression were one-to-one cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) or maintenance doses of antidepressants. Both of these are relatively expensive. Not everyone is comfortable taking the drugs and they can have unwanted side effects. And not everyone can have one-to-one CBT – there is a limit to the availability of trained therapists. Coming up with an economically viable and effective group-based intervention therefore seemed urgent.

To understand the approach Segal, Williams and Teasdale took, and why they took it, it will be helpful to consider a scenario they outline in the first of their books – Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression.

Mary has just come from work. She’s tired and she looks forward to spending her evening relaxing in front of the television. However, there’s a message on her answerphone. Her partner is going to be late getting back from work. She gets angry and feels disappointed and upset. Then she starts to recall other occasions that month when the same thing happened. She begins to imagine that her partner may be being unfaithful to her. She pushes that thought to one side but it comes back with even greater force when she imagines that she has heard some laughter in the background of his voicemail. Nausea comes up – and it doesn’t end there. Her mind rapidly starts to conjure up images of an unwanted future – solicitors, divorce courts, having to buy another home, living in poverty. She feels herself getting more and more upset as her anger begins to turn into depression. Her mind throws up images from the past when she was rejected and lonely. She ‘knows’ that all their mutual friends would abandon her for him. Tears flow as she is left wondering what to do. Sitting in her kitchen she asks herself ‘Why does this always happen to me?’ and she tries to work out why she always reacts this way.

Mary experiences a whole avalanche of thoughts, feelings and sensations. It is not just the negative matter that caused her to be upset, however, nor is it just the way she found herself trying to deal with it. Instead, it’s as if a whole mode of mind – a complex configuration of moods, thoughts, images, impulses and body sensations – was very quickly wheeled into place in response to the situation. This mode of mind includes both the negative material and Mary’s tendency to deal with it by ruminating.

Like Mary, people who are vulnerable to depression can put much of their time and energy into ruminating about their experience – ‘Why do I feel the way I do?’ Thinking about their problems, their sense of personal inadequacy, they turn things over and over in their minds trying to think their way to solutions and to ways of reducing their distress. But, as Segal, Williams and Teasdale point out, the methods they use to achieve that aim are tragically counterproductive. In fact, when you’re low, repeatedly ruminating – thinking about apparently negative aspects of yourself or of problematic situations – actively perpetuates rather than resolves depression.

What seems to happen is that, at times of low mood, old habits of thinking switch in relatively automatically. That has two consequences: firstly, thinking now runs in well-worn grooves that don’t lead to a way out of depression; secondly, this way of thinking itself intensifies the depressed mood – and that leads to further rumination. In this way a series of self-perpetuating vicious cycles can cause mild and transient low mood to very quickly degenerate into severe, disabling depression.