Falling gracefully
How come we are so keen to reduce and avoid certain feelings like anxiety, frustration, anger, sadness, loneliness and grief, while feelings like joy, excitement, happiness and calm are ones we want more and more of? This may seem like an obvious question, but take a moment to think about it right now, as all of these feelings are completely natural and essential to being human.
We tend to label our feelings as ‘positive and negative’ or ‘good and bad’ because of how physiologically they feel in our bodies. The ‘negative’ stuff tends to create tension, tightness and exhaustion in the body, while the ‘positive’ stuff tends to create lightness, warmth, fuzziness and spaciousness. Any of these emotions, however, can be a helpful clue to what we have or do not have in our life and what we want or need. We will come back to this idea later in this chapter but, for now, let us consider the reason for all the unpleasantness in our lives and how we might approach falling in to the pits of these emotions in a more graceful fashion.
Safety first
Many of the feelings we do not like, that are uncomfortable, are the ones designed to keep us safe. When noticing a threat, we jump straight in to fight, flight or freeze mode, whether we like it or not. We might feel sensations in our body that we call anxiety, panic or fear that prepare our body to escape a threatening situation quickly, while anger serves to push people and other situations away that we may perceive to be harmful to us. All this discomfort that we experience in our body is like a warning signal, telling our body to do whatever it takes to keep us safe and protected from harm.
This safety mechanism is extremely effective, to the extent that it can get signalled even when there is no real threat there at all – it can simply be imagined in our minds (as we discussed in Part 2 of this book). The problem then arises when we become so fixated on our anxiety-related concerns, especially in our busy, hectic lives, that not only do we lose our ability to discriminate effectively between what is real and what is imagined, but we are so pumped full of anxiety (and many of the other unwanted emotions) that we become fearful of even taking time to reflect on what is going on. Act now, think about it never.
What can happen often, as we have seen, is that these primitive caveman/cavewoman tendencies trigger a lot of adrenaline, which – especially when over-used – clouds our thinking and leads to unhelpful decision making, not to mention lots of physical aches and pains, which all impede our progress with what we want to achieve in life. All this panicking, stressing and trying to sort it all out right now is quite inefficient and tends to shrink our world. We know that many of us feel like we thrive on a certain level of stress, we feel alive and energised. This is exactly the point of adrenaline – it is stimulating, but only for relatively short periods, before we end up burnt out. Many psychological studies have shown that certain levels of anxiety and stress impair concentration needed for decision making and reduce the quality of our work and performance in life more generally.
Putting on the brakes
By noticing, acknowledging and turning towards this discomfort, we are putting the brakes on our autopilot mind. Instead of jumping to our automatic, natural reactions, we can SLOW down enough to decide a different route that may take us in a much more helpful direction. Take a look at this next case example to see how it can be helpful to put on the brakes when our emotions are running high.
Ellen
Ellen had a wide circle of friends and spent much of her time outside of her working day visiting them, hosting elaborate dinner parties and keeping up with all their birthdays and anniversaries by buying gifts and baking cakes. When friends visited, she would ensure the house was spotless, filled with fresh flowers and would spend several hours preparing food. She admitted that it was difficult to keep up with all of this on top of her work and taking care of her children, but she kept going in this way as she dreaded the idea of her friends being disappointed if she didn’t make the effort.
In fact, therapy helped Ellen to recognise that underneath all her busyness she was afraid of being rejected by her friends and ending up alone and lonely. At one of her therapy sessions, Ellen explained that she had become very upset as a friend had not thanked her for all her efforts after a dinner party. When this type of thing would happen in the past, Ellen found herself quickly feeling angry and either messaging her friend to say how upset she was and that she wasn’t welcome around again or she would stonewall them and ignore them, allocating them to her ‘black book’ as she called it. Unfortunately, this often resulted in arguments with her friend, leaving Ellen feeling increasingly distressed.
However, on this occasion Ellen was able to remind herself of the SLOW down technique. She acknowledged that she was feeling angry and upset, and realised that her feelings were a sign of just how important her friends were to her. She decided instead to message her friend to say she had a lovely evening, appreciated her coming along and asked whether she enjoyed herself. Her friend replied thanking her for all the fun they had and invited her around for the next gathering. Over time, Ellen also came to realise that she didn’t need to make so much effort trying to please her friends as it was her company they enjoyed and not whether the house was spotless and the food perfect.
When it all just gets too much
Sometimes, our feelings can be so overwhelming it is hard to get perspective as easily as Ellen did. Sometimes, our anxiety might lead to a panic attack, our anger turn to rage or we might just feel completely disconnected from what is happening around us. Of course, if these feelings are a sign you are in real danger, get yourself to a place of safety and call for help, if necessary. Once you are safe, then try out the following exercise to bring you back to the here and now.
Practice 8.1: I haven’t got time for this!
Loosening the grip
- Acknowledge how you are feeling right now, perhaps saying in your own mind, ‘I am noticing that I am feeling anxious/angry/sad.’
- Notice where in your body you experience these feelings most vividly.
- Notice that you are breathing and how you are breathing, whether ragged, short, fast, shallow, painful, whatever it is, just as it is.
- You do not need to fix your feelings, push them away or ignore them. Whatever happens, the feelings will not last, nothing does.
- Remember that you have not always felt like this, you will not always feel like this, this is a moment of distress.
- Now notice where you are indoors/outdoors. Notice what you can see around you – people, objects, lights, colours.
- And notice your feelings, just as they are, no need to change anything at all.
- Now notice what you can hear: traffic, birds, ticking of a clock, hum of electricity and notice that here, too, are your feelings, just as they are.
- And focus on your breath, noticing the natural rhythm and flow as you let go of the grip on your feelings. Letting them be just as they are.
- If you are able to practise like this, keep going. Keep returning to the breath, no matter how often or how strongly you are distracted by thoughts or feelings.
- Watch the feelings changing all by themselves, in their own good time.
Papering over the cracks
For many of us, sticking to the same routines and schedules day in and day out can become rather mundane and thrill-zapping. Add to this the little time that our busy lives allow for fun and frolics, being so busy can be a real drag most of the time. We might try to do more, engage in more just to paper over any possible boredom lurking beneath. This becomes a tiresome effort as the cracks just keep appearing. When we practise mindfulness, the paper is peeled away and often we find boredom underneath.
Yet boredom and distraction are often just the first layer in emotion, masking over something else. Usually, they serve a purpose as strategies for avoiding something, such as even more uncomfortable feelings like impatience, fear, sadness or grief. Already, boredom is giving us a helpful clue that we are avoiding something, that we feel uncomfortable and we want it to go away.
Mindfulness can become a fertile ground for boredom as we learn to stay with the urge to avoid. This can be done by adopting an attitude of curiosity … oh, look, I am bored to tears, how very interesting! Perhaps we can let go, allow our habitual thoughts and urges to ‘do something about it’ just to pass, to dissolve, which can be a lot less exhausting and stressful than constantly trying to fight it away. But then, back comes our habitual mind, sometimes as quick as a flash and, each time we do this, we push away our life, we reject our true feelings, we reject ourselves. Probably, we are traipsing down one of those old familiar neural pathways. As soon as we avoid the present moment, here and now, we start to increase a sense of dissatisfaction and the urge to get away from it rapidly to doing something (another to-do list, perhaps? Or how about reformatting that spreadsheet?). We perpetuate our boredom and dissatisfaction with life, ironically, we increase our pain, our busyness and layer it over with an illusion (like finding something else to do). But when we are mindful of our emotions, often we recognise what we are up to, what we have been avoiding and papering over and, in this case, it is boredom.
There are so many ways to paper over our emotions, keep up the pretence, just watch the ads on TV – perhaps a new shampoo will be the answer to your woes? No, then try a new car? A great rate of interest on that mortgage? A trip abroad? The possibilities are endless. More distractions, more opportunities to avoid boredom, two for the price of one; more ways to perpetuate your dissatisfaction with life each more promising than the last. It is not your fault, life is full of fascinating ideas, objects and sensations – perhaps we have just forgotten that we, too, are one of those – right here, right now. How about pulling back that paper and finding the door and walking on out into the fresh air? Go on!
Practice 8.2: Mindfulness right now!
Booooring!
- Notice how you know you feel bored. Perhaps if there is something specially ‘bored’ about your posture, your facial expression, your breathing or thoughts.
- How bored are you? Rate from 0–100 per cent.
- What urges do you have to paper over your boredom:
(Choose any): food, TV, Twitter, Facebook, talking, drinking, texting, sex, magazines, exercise, work, radio, DIY, helping others, drugs, drawing, smoking, cleaning, worrying, holidays, gambling, daydreaming, driving fast, bird-watching, clubbing, plate-spinning, inventing, sleeping. - Remind yourself of the Zen saying: ‘If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are still just as they are.’
- Try holding these thoughts/feelings/sensations with gentleness.
- Let go of habits to cover up boredom and watch boredom unfold. It is only an experience, only sensations, only a moment.
Each time you let go of your struggle with this emotion you are letting go of a lifetime’s habitual way of thinking and responding to it – just one breath at a time.
Deep impact
When we begin to become more aware of what is lurking underneath the papered walls, we might also notice what effect it has on our body. If you were to scowl all day long, the chances are that you would feel more stressed and frustrated as a result:
Try it right now.
- Scrunch up, wrinkle and contract your brow, hold it … hold it … and notice how you feel emotionally as a result, in this very moment …
What happened? Did you feel instantly more p’d off? The chances are you did. Similarly, if you tense your stomach muscles or clench your jaw, you may feel more agitated and stressed. Go on, give it a go now, gently. So, make a purposeful effort to check in with your facial expression and bodily tension, as often as you can, and you may find that you are able to notice changes to your emotions and sense of busyness by some simple body awareness and realignment.
Practice 8.3: Mindfulness right now!
Settling in comfortably
- Notice your body posture as you are sitting or standing. Are your shoulders hunched up, your back arched over? Readjust so your shoulders drop, your back straightens and you are in a comfortable and balanced position.
- Become aware of the muscles in your face and where feels tight or scrunched up. See if you can loosen your jaw, smooth your forehead, widen your eyes.
- Scan your body for any areas that feel tight or restricted. Breathe in to and around this place in your body, letting go of any tension as you breathe out.
- As you continue to breathe, imagine air filling your stomach as you breathe in and pull your tummy button towards your back as you breathe out. This will help to slow down and deepen your breathing.
Sad case
Boys are not supposed to feel sad. Girls are, but only if they do not wear mascara. Sadness often gets pretty squashed. Anger is a bit more acceptable, especially in public, and it looks cooler, but take a closer look and there is probably sadness, too. And, so, we might see that we have been trying, or are trying to turn our sadness into something else: anger, confusion or helplessness. It is uncomfortable.
Sadness needs a lot of care, but we will never access this while we are harsh, critical or blameful towards ourselves or others, no – sadness will hide away. ‘Phew!’ you might think, it is best avoided – let us stick with the macho stuff, please. But we know your secret (and ours) – this is the soft spot; this sadness is our Achilles’ heel, our ‘weakness’, we have found the Kryptonite! We guess yours is something like, ‘I am not good enough, I can’t cope, I am stupid, no one wants me, I am crazy’, which all equals ‘I am unlovable.’ So, your secret is that you think no one will/should/could love you.
By just paying some mindful attention to our pain, to our sense of vulnerability and being unlovable, we can find that it is quite bearable (and even loveable). Well, that is what Meera discovered, as you can see in the following example.
Meera
Meera: (crying) Who would want me? Look at me. I am so sad and broken.
Psychologist: Have I told you the story of the broken pots?
Meera: What?
Psychologist: OK, so it goes a bit like this. Every day a lady goes to the well to fetch the water. It is a long walk and she carries two pots on a heavy yoke across her shoulders. One pot is whole, the other is cracked. The cracked pot is sad, as it notices how hard the lady works and how it is letting her down by not holding the water. It says to her one day, ‘Please throw me away, I am no good, I am broken.’ The lady says, ‘But, sweet pot, you bring me such joy, have you not noticed how the flowers bloom along your side of the road?’
Meera: Are you calling me a crack-pot? (laughs)
Psychologist: Yes, and that is so precious. You are human and I recognise that, I know what that means. With your tears, I see your vulnerability and it touches me. Look at me now, leaning forward towards you in the chair. I am engaged. I feel connected.
Meera: But that is just you.
Psychologist: OK, so there you go again. It does not matter if I love you or not or if I am connected to you or not, if you cannot accept yourself as you are. So, no wonder you feel so lonely. Are you rejecting yourself because you do not feel whole? You expect someone else to want you when you do not even want yourself. Even if they did want you, why would you trust that if you do not believe you deserve to be loved? It leaves you feeling so isolated and alone and unloved. Just like now, here …
Meera: But … I do want to be loved.
Psychologist: Yes, that is not the problem, is it?
Meera: No. I want to be loved for being a whole pot, but I am not. I am broken and I want to be fixed.
Psychologist: And you are not fixed.
Meera: No. I do not want to be sad.
Psychologist: I know, and you are. Let us just sit with that for a moment and breathe.
With mindfulness, we give the sadness some attention; we name it and notice it, we recognise it. We see the brokenness and vulnerability, which we have spent so long racing away from and busying ourselves along with a ‘just get on with it’ attitude. We notice the way we have rejected our pain, denied it while we jump into tasks and chores. But now see that, just by giving ourselves some simple attention, a cup of tea (and – go on – a biscuit, too), so to speak, we can bear this experience of heartache, longing, loneliness, helplessness and sense of our unlovableness, and with this attention we offer love. And then we can let this go, we can allow it to pass as it inevitably will. And do you know what the great paradox is? It is your misery, your suffering, sadness and vulnerability; your great fear of being unlovable that makes you so loveable.
It’s good to cry!
Another thing you might notice when you begin to turn towards your sadness is that you might cry. Interestingly, our tears serve a helpful function by helping to manage our sadness. A study was conducted to look closely at the physical properties of tears. They compared tears from cutting onions, tears of laughter and emotional tears, such as grief. When they looked at these different types of tears under a microscope, they found that they all looked vastly different. Different types of tears are made up of different molecules. Our emotional tears contain a neurotransmitter called leucine encephalin, which is a natural painkiller that is released when we are feeling stressed. If you have ever given yourself the opportunity to have a good cry, you may have experienced a sense of relief and, perhaps, even felt better for it, and this is why.
Grief and loss
Grief is the melancholic of our guests. Sadness cloaks this one. When grief strikes us suddenly and unexpectedly, it is a shock and, even when she sneaks up, seen in the shadows of long illness or old age, we can find her familiar face still catches us unaware. We can also grieve for lost opportunities, lost youth, money or possessions. Every day, in our busy lives, we might notice our losses, even in little ways with not enough time for this or that or some regret: the too tight trousers, the mouldy yoghurt at the back of the fridge, the missed calls, missed lunch breaks and rapidly passed weekends.
Some everyday losses can feel even greater: the missing out on that bonus and work promotion or even the loss of our jobs that we had poured so much of ourselves into. Then the winter comes, leaves fall from the trees, friends, family, lovers come and go. Sadness can pervade our lives as we see this endless cycle, particularly when we come into contact with a significant loss.
This following is a piece of a story about someone in a state of shock and grief and their use of mindfulness at that time. This is what she wrote.
Lucy’s story
My best friend’s boyfriend has just been killed in a sudden and tragic accident. She has just texted me, telling me she is on the way to the hospital with his parents to identify the body. She described this as a ‘living hell’. There is nothing to say, nothing to make this one change, to ‘make it better’ or turn back the clocks with ‘if only’ or ‘why’. When death comes like this, there are no more chances to say, ‘I love you’ or to resolve the wounds of our past; a life is simply swept away, leaving behind a great gaping hole of grief. As a friend, all I can do is to be there. This too is the role of mindfulness. I hold the aching form of my sorrow with tenderness and let myself crack. There is no correct way to ‘behave’, I am numb, angry, disappointed, despairing or quietly sad by turns, sometimes none of these. No choice but to ride this wave.
Try the following exercise whenever you like, paying attention and offering acceptance to your loss and grief. No matter how small or large this sadness feels, try this exercise to acknowledge and be alongside this sadness.
Practice 8.4: I haven’t got time for this!
Reflective mindfulness
- Give yourself a quiet space to sit in stillness.
- Allow the grief to come, as it may, in waves.
- Open up to this washing over you, as you also open your heart to this suffering that connects all living beings.
- Keep returning to your breathing to ground you in the present, in your life, here and now, just as it is.
- It may be helpful to remind ourselves ‘this too shall pass’. Allowing emotions to come, letting them go as you gently still the mind.
It can be a jarring experience, when we meet with grief, that the world continues on. The earth continues to turn on its axis, the sun rises, people continue with their activities, there is still washing up to do, etc. However, it is also these activities, this continued rhythm of life, that can help to bring us back again. So, while we need to take time to accept our grief with tenderness, we also need, eventually, to begin to find our contact point for re-entry into life. We need to recall that spring inevitably will follow winter, that we can re-engage and that there is still joy to be found. This can take a lot of time (that is fine) and it can be accompanied by guilt and doubt. Just like other practices in mindfulness, we can return to our point of contact with the present, our point of engagement with life, over and over again. Jess’s story below is a reminder of what this painful grief is really all about.
After losing her mother to cancer, Jess thought that she was unable to cope with her grief and that her life was no longer worth living. With mindfulness practice she learnt to observe her thoughts and return to her breath. This wasn’t an easy task and often she would quickly get caught up in her thinking and even fantasising ways to end her life, and then she would once again remember to return to her breath. Practising in this way, with time, she began to notice that underneath all of her pain and emptiness there was something incredibly meaningful; that she dearly loved her mother and missed the time they spent together. This awareness led Jess to find ways to honour her mother’s life and treasure her memories.
Good grief
When we see the pain, distress and agony of loss, it may be that we discover something more, something that tells us about our purpose, our deep connection to others, to our planet or to our commitment to ourselves. For example, the ending of a relationship can be very painful and, yet, perhaps if we seek deeply, we may also find our fragile and loving desire to care for others and to be cared for, too, we may find our deep wish to be well, to be happy and to feel safe. Then, alongside the pain of this loss, we also see what is most important to us, our true heart, one that longs to connect, one that misses or has missed that chance with this person, or that part of our life, and knows the pain of it. This desire is bigger than death or endings, because we continue to mourn the loss of connection, despite the absolute inevitability of it. In other words, we all seek, desire and need human contact, attention and care and yet all of us will one day die, all the relationships we have will cease or change.
Grief is the emotion that reminds us of our connection to others, that reminds us that, even with these fragile feet of clay, we have an infinite capacity to love. To love and to lose are two sides of the same coin; one cannot be experienced without the experience of the other.
A word of caution – watch yourself if you find you begin to use mindfulness as a way to avoid life. The notion that mindfulness practice can be a way to be immune, aloof, cut off or removed from grief is misguided. It really is a form of denial, stuckness and arrogance, telling us that we are ‘above’ this need for contact with others, this ‘neediness’, somehow superior to it. We may tell ourselves that loss is ‘the will of God’ or that ‘life is just a dream’, or it was ‘meant to be’ – such platitudes delude us that we can hold such pain at bay. Seen in others, they can be, frankly, humourless and beyond the pale.
Mindfulness top tips to-go
In this chapter, you have learned that it is helpful to:
- Look at the effects that our difficult emotions have on our body and how they affect our thinking.
- Realise that our difficult emotions often serve to protect us and that avoiding them often only serves as a waste of time and adds further stress to our lives.
- Notice that boredom and distraction often tell us that we are avoiding something, some uncomfortable feeling that we would like to get rid of.
- Recognise that difficult emotions are part of our lives in an infinite number of ways and we can and do cope with them – and this is amazing in itself.
- Acknowledge difficult emotions and see them as part of being human and being alive.
- Notice that these emotions, no matter how painful, often tell us what is so important to us, what we need and desire as human beings.
- Realise that you can continue to use mindfulness when these or any other difficult emotions arise.