Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat Zinn

Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat Zinn

 Chapter 1: You Have Only Moments to Live 2

Chapter 2 The Foundations of Mindfulness Practice: Attitudes and Commitment 3

Chapter 3 The power of breathing 3

Chapter 4: Sitting Mediation 4

Chapter 5 Being in Your Body: The Body-Scan Meditation 4

Chapter 6 Cultivating Strength 5

Chapter 7 Walking Meditation 5

Chapter 8 A day of mindfulness 5

Chapter 9 Really doing what you’re doing 5

Chapter 10 Getting started in practice 6

Chapter 11 Introduction to the paradigm 7

Chapter 12 Glimpses of wholeness 7

Chapter 13 On healing 8

Chapter 14 Doctors, Patients and people 9

Chapter 15 Mind and Body: Evidence That Beliefs, Attitudes, Thoughts, and Emotions Can Harm or Heal 10

Chapter 16 Connectedness and interconnectedness 11

Chapter 17 Stress 13

Chapter 18 Change, the one thing you can be sure of 14

Chapter 19 Stuck in stress reactivity 14

Chapter 20 Responding to stress as opposed to reacting 15

Chapter 21 Working with symptoms: listening to your body 16

Chapter 22 Working with Physical Pain: Your Pain Is Not You 17

Chapter 23 More on working with pain 19

Chapter 24 Working with emotional pain 20

Chapter 25 Working with Fear, Panic, and Anxiety 22

Chapter 26 Time and Time Stress 23

Chapter 27 Sleep and Sleep stress 25

Chapter 28 People stress 25

Chapter 29 Role Stress 26

Chapter 30 Work stress 27

Chapter 31 Food stress 28

Chapter 32 World Stress 29

Chapter 33 New Beginnings 30

Chapter 34  Keeping up formal practice 30

Chapter 35 Keeping up informal practice 30

Chapter 36 The way of awareness 30

Chapter 1: You Have Only Moments to Live

In mindfulness we are paying attention, observing what we are doing. Mindfulness is non doing, that allows us to be aware of what we are doing, what  are senses are engaging with and how our bodies are.  So to fully pay attention to tasting, seeing. This can make our senses more vivid. We can pay attention to what we are doing, which can give us more information about what we are doing and then make better choices.  Thus mindfulness can be a prelude to action.

With out thoughts we can pay attention to them, label them, and let them go.  In doing this we can see our repeated patterns,  and we can choose to engage with them or not, if they are helpful to us.

Thing is whilst this has a point, that we can be attentive to our perception, which can lead to sensation and information. There is, I would argue no raw moment, rather there is a multiplicity of sensation, that involves past (to make sense of), future in terms of plans, and not now, i.e. how the world should be which derives into future.  This is coming from the ecstatic sense of time from Heidegger. I would also add from Gendlin that we have a sense that is our experience, and we can engage with that via certain labels. It doesn’t seem that we could ever run out of those labels, the sense seems infinite.  Likewise add in the sense that our sense has a direction that is implicit, and could be carried forward in several ways, there is no definitive now that mindfulness could engage in.

 

Chapter 2 The Foundations of Mindfulness Practice: Attitudes and Commitment

We judge the world, and we like to try to get it to turn out how we want it.  The core philosophy of mindfulness is non - judging , patience , a beginner’s mind , trust , non - striving , acceptance , and letting go .

We categorize and judge so quickly it becomes automatic, and conceive that that’s how the world is

Non judging and beginners mind,  allows us to know more, patience can be useful to allow things to unfold, and to see all of it,  Trust again can trust the description you have rather than an authority, non-striving allows you to stay phenomenologically with the experience.  Acceptance is accepting things as they are now, you may not like it but that’s how they are, it allows you again to move closer to it.  Acceptance can form a good basis for action, I am overweight, so it would help if I ate less. Letting go of striving, of understanding lets us engage with our experience.

 

For me this again is a helpful initial practice, as when you are more aware, then you can take the action that best suits you. At points in your living, you will not want to be mindful of your whole experience, you would base your action on previous awareness.

 

Chapter 3 The power of breathing

The rhythm of the planet, the ebb and flow of the tides, the seasons, the rhythm of creatures, the birth and death, the inhale and exhale, the nourish, and the purify, the rhythm of life. It feels luxurious to link the breath to the tides.

We have feelings of panic when we hyper ventilate.  When we meditate we pay attention, one classic meditation is to pay attention to the breathing.  Paying attention to your breathing can, quite naturally, move you into diaphragmatic breathing as this is the original way we learnt to breathe.

As we meditate with the breath, then we disengage with thoughts, we observe them, so they  are less agitating. This in turn slows our breathing, this in turn gives signals to the automatic nervous system  and the para sympathetic, which triggers the rest and digest mode.

If your abdomen is tight it restricts the diaphragm and therefore the breath,

 

Chapter 4: Sitting Mediation

The meditation of the breath is a non-doing. It is paying attention to the breath and just being aware of this.  Being with the sensation of the breath, observing any distractions and returning to the breath.

If you are distracted by the pain of sitting, then observing the pain and returning to the breath. This can help in time to your powers of concentration, calmness and  awareness and to help you respond with awareness to events rather than automatically react.  To help with pain, you can breathe into the pain and out of it.

If you are distracted by a thought, then you might observe and return to the breath. In doing this you are teaching yourself that your thoughts aren’t facts, they aren’t you or reality. Many thoughts will come and go over your lifetime. What you think is reality now will change, what you desire will change, at best all a thought is, is representative of what  you think the world is at the moment, or what you think you are at the moment, but both will change.

Choiceless awareness, is just being aware with whatever comes, to notice and return to being aware.

Of course there is a contradiction in this, meditation is a doing, it is the doing of meditation. It is dropping out of the base engagement with the world, which is to use it.

 

Chapter 5 Being in Your Body: The Body-Scan Meditation

We are so preoccupied with how our body looks and so out of touch with it from the inside.

We get preoccupied with our bodies as we are growing up, perpetuated in society and within  media and advertising, and those with the desired bodies get infatuated with themselves and attention and other people highly desire that they had similar bodies. Then this stays and we have a deep insecurity with our body and are never at home in it.

We can change this by moving from appearance and judgement of our bodies to experiencing them.

If during the body scan you feel an insistent pain, then if it keeps taking your attention to it, then move your attention back to the place where you want it, and breath in and out of that region.  Then you come to the problem area, and just notice, breathe in and out of it, and move on to the next area.

Thus, you are practicing moving through the region of maximum intensity and also making it wait its turn for attention, whilst you give attention to other parts of the body.

If the pain is too intense, then another approach is to go to the area of maximum intensity and breathe in and out of it.  As you do this notice how your sensations change in quality. If it subsides enough go to other areas.

 

Chapter 6 Cultivating Strength

When we feel ill or in pain, we tend to stop and rest and then the rest of our body atrophies.  Disuse atrophy is when something isn’t used it weakens.

Part of yoga is to reconnect ourselves with our wholeness of all the parts of us that do work. In yoga we stretch and strengthen.

When we’re ill we can become preoccupied with being ill and the rest of the world and our body gets lost. In doing yoga then it can gently return.

From a therapeutic perspective, yoga would stretch and strengthen the mind, so increase perspective, mental flexibility and self-efficacy through strength.

 

Chapter 7 Walking Meditation

If you do a walking meditation, keep your focus on one aspect of walking rather than moving it around. In anchoring you then get to notice distraction.

 

Chapter 8 A day of mindfulness

Not much to say here, retreats can be powerful

 

Chapter 9 Really doing what you’re doing

Some people get busy to avoid something, this can lead to half doing the thing that they are doing. The doing becomes an avoidance, a time filler.

Fully engaging with what  you are doing, the sensations of it, can invigorate the thing being done, give more information about the thing being done, so can lead you to do it in different ways and also give you a powerful sense of having done it. For instance, people can overeat as they never have fully engaged with their eating, so need to eat more.

Likewise, things can seem more stimulating and less like a chore, when you fully engage with them. So mindful engagement can lessen the load. Likewise, in engaging with the full experience of activities, you can see your thoughts and emotions that appear whilst doing the activity, which again, can illuminate the meaning of the activity and can change how you do it.

You can also in mundane activities engage with impermanence, as you clean the dishes, you can notice how many times you will do this.

 

Chapter 10 Getting started in practice

All this refers to Jon Kabat Zinn’s audio

Weeks 1 & 2

Daily

Body scan + mindfulness of breath + informal practice

 

Weeks 3 &4

Daily

Alternate Body Scan and Mindful Yoga + mindfulness of breath + informal practice

 

Weeks 5&6

Daily

Sitting practice alternated with Mindful Yoga+ choiceless awareness + informal practice

 

Week 7

Self-directed practice for 45 minutes from above choices without the audio

 

Week 8

Self-directed practice for 45 minutes from above choices with the audio

 

Chapter 11 Introduction to the paradigm

Integrative medicine is seeing body and mind as involved in healing.

Participatory medicine is people being involved in their healing by doing things, rehabilitating physically and mentally, for instance meditation and yoga.

Body and mind being connected, then you need to notice the relationship between the two, to understand any ease or dis-ease.

If you think of the complexity of the interaction between the bodily systems, and the mental system, then you have a huge allostatic system, which contains many homeostatic systems.  This in turn implies the environmental systems that this body is part of and then connects the whole of experience from the “inner” to the “outer”, one large system.

In some ways this points towards wholeness, one system from environmental connected to the body\mind system.

 

Chapter 12 Glimpses of wholeness

Have you engaged with a being, fully engaged with them? Being with an animal say a pet, and feeling the sense of them existing now, experiencing them in their fullness, all of them.  The wonder of them all. Sometimes our thoughts, judgements, categorisations can get in the way of the wonder of all, of the natural world.

If you think about your body and its abilities it is quite extraordinary. Speech, digestion, walking, talking, thinking, seeing, it all is quite amazing, and takes a level of sophistication far beyond human ingenuity.  Our body is a universe of 10 trillion cells born of a single cell.  Our bodies are self-organising and self-healing.

Our language and concepts are learnt from others, and then embed within our bodies to drive and organise their behaviour, which in turn creates the allostatic conditions that our bodies tune in to.

Our world is constructed out of the physical and psychic systems that both form us and are structures in which we live. From the systems in our bodies, the systems of thought\belief and their interconnections, the relationships between people, the natural systems of meteorology, of geology, systems, within systems.

Our minds seem at times like magnets to simplicity and to avoid novelty. So habitual ways of thinking dominate.

The argument from JKZ is that if you do not identify a system in its entirety, you will never establish a satisfactory solution. However, given the argument above, about systems, within, systems, this is quite a large claim!

Habitual thinking can get supported by behaviours, e.g. “I can’t drive”, so I avoid driving and prove my belief. So, in this instance one system, our mental one, restricts our behavioural one.

JKZ argues that meditation, being, connects us with our wholeness. Hmm that’s quite a statement, and I’m not sure that I agree with as you seem to need to go outside the moment to get there.

In our living we get hurt, so we carry around both psychological, behavioural, and physical armour.

Health is a dynamic process that depends on the operation of a system and its interaction with others.

Wholeness and interconnectedness are the most fundamental aspect for us as humans.

 

Chapter 13 On healing

Health comes from the word “whole” and “holy”.  Healing comes to mean engaging with the sense of wholeness that you are, and interconnectedness.

There is a coming to peace with what is, you don’t need to like it. In this way you reduce the suffering from the pain if that’s what you feel.  The sense of wholeness means to be complete, to have nothing missing. You can experience this by being aware. As you observe your experience, even if you like or dislike, then this moment is complete there’s nothing missing, you are fully engaged in the experience and therefore you are whole, you are at home in the moment.

The sense of wholeness is also a sense of perfection as you are, even If you have imperfections. There is wonder in your being as you are. Likewise, as you inhabit this present moment in awareness then you are whole. Nothing is missing in this present moment, it is everything.

It is as a whole human being, that our internal systems make sense

Wholeness goes with interconnectedness as is an antidote to fragmentation and isolation which case suffering.

Meditation is less likely to be healing if you are using it to get somewhere.

Meditation is  residing in the stillness of being, just engaging in awareness in the present moment.

 

Chapter 14 Doctors, Patients and people

The brain isn’t a fixed organ, the body isn’t a fixed organ. We have neuroplasticity in the brain, where what fires together wires together and conversely connections aren’t used will be pruned.

The body isn’t a fixed organ and epigenetics turn on and off genes dependent on the influence of the environment.

Epigenetics can reduce inflammation, which in turn can have a powerful effect on some diseases.

The mind across both brain and body, is a very powerful aspect. The placebo effect is the most reliable medical effect which is entirely controlled by the mind.

Telomeres are at the end of chromosomes and play a key role in cell replication. Stress reduces the size of telomeres and therefore their effectiveness. Stress therefore ages us . People can put large amounts of faith in modern medicine because of its success, but then also don’t see the areas where medicine doesn’t know, cant explain, until it happens to their body or the body of someone they love.

Taking the approach of medicine will fix me, can reduce the sense of people looking after their own health.

Personal beliefs have a large influence on suffering and dying. They can both reduce suffering and stave off dying.

Dr Engels proposed the biopsychosocial model, that argues that a person disease or rehabilitation from a disease is an outcome of biology, psychology and sociology.

Many aspects of the body, that were though involuntary, heart rate, skin temperature, brain wave were thought to be automatic, but can be influenced by biofeedback. So, a machine can give feedback to patient which can affect these areas, same as acupuncture. The idea here as well is that meditation can do the same.

 

Chapter 15 Mind and Body: Evidence That Beliefs, Attitudes, Thoughts, and Emotions Can Harm or Heal

Cognitive healing aspects

Self-efficacy: comes from both the belief in your abilities, and memories of having achieved things that are important to you. The higher level of self-efficacy, then the higher the confidence, and the higher the ability to achieve things.  Self-efficacy also increases if you are inspired by other people, seeing what they can do\achieve.

Stress hardy individuals have high levels of control, commitment and challenge.

Challenge that you can grow\get rewards through overcoming

Being healthy means you can restore balance, after a stressful situation. This is enabled via coherence, having a solid view of yourself and the world. This coherence in turn is enabled by comprehensibility, meaningfulness and manageability.  So, with comprehensibility, you can make sense of the stressful event, within terms of the world view, likewise it is meaningful within terms of the world view and then it is also manageable, i.e. that you have the resources to manage the stressful event.

MBSR, according to JKZ studies, increases stress hardiness and  sense of coherence . These factors have been personality aspects, so the small, 5% increase from MBSR is rather surprising.

Why would that be though?

I guess if you can observe better, then your ability to manage your emotions increases, and your pain.  This would increase stress hardiness.  I guess mindfulness can enrich your engagement with the world, so part of your worldview would be I can engage and get value from the simplest things which I guess would make your world view more flexible.

Emotional healing aspects

Feeling a lack of closeness with your parents, ambivalence to relationships and life, correlates with getting cancer, this is shown from a 40-year study.  Suppression of emotions, difficulty expressing emotions also correlates with cancer.

Strong positive emotions, or total denial helps with cancer survival.

Studies in animals show a link between helpless and the immune system, with animals who exhibit helpless having less natural killer cells, which ward off illness.

Some people believe that cancer cells are produced all the time, but the immune system standardly kills them, so a weakened immune system leads to cancer.

Stressed power motivation,  a trait that indicates a higher susceptibility to disease.

Stressed power motivation sees people have a desire to have power over people, and they are aggressive, argumentative and competitive. They want status and prestige not affiliation. They tend to get ill when stress and stressed when their personal sense of power is diminished.

 On the other side people who want to affiliate for no other purpose than to connect with people tend to have a lower tendency to disease.

Again, MBSR testing by JKZ showed that levels of affiliation increased over the course.

 

Social isolation correlates with premature death and tend to be both psychologically and physically less healthy.

 

In summary thoughts and feeling that foster hopeless and helpless feelings, a cynicism towards others, loss of control and  cynicism. Emotional suppression and social isolation all appear to be correlative to poor health

Chapter 16 Connectedness and interconnectedness

When you care about a living being, that being needs you. You are valuable to it. When its yourself, you have more control and are more subject than object.  When you are in relationship then you belong to a group bigger than you, there is you and the other.  All of this can give meaning to life, and make you more resistant to ill health as studies have shown.

Connection between people is when each are present with the other, and the other can see that, or feel that, though, sight, touch and hearing.  Connection is also about responsiveness to need, to be met emotionally, as I am scared with another so connection is about validation of that emotion and response to it

Dan Siegel argues that the tenets and teachings of MBSR exactly mirror the tenets of secure attachment, I guess through the attachment to your experience.

The body has several systems that look to self-regulate, food for instance.

You have a budget of what is expected, then then you need to translate that to food requirements. This requires information coming from various internal and external systems. E.g. it’s a cold day, you’re going to go for a walk, it used x amount of energy last time. Dr Schwarz saw that humans that get sick have dysregulated systems, as there is a disruption to feedback loops, so for instance the ability to be aware of how full you feel. If you aren’t aware of those signals as you ignore them then that feedback loop wouldn’t work, and  you could eat too much.  For him disordered behaviour is a disease.

So for me eating too much fat possibly clogged my arteries, which caused heart disease.  I’m not sure how the feedback loops didn’t work, in terms of eating too much fat, again that’s speculative as oppose epigenetics narrowing arteries. I guess if you consider that babies know what they need to each there would be a muddying of these feedback loops to get disordered eating, when you would eat for comfort and rewards.

Schwarzes argument is that it is dis-attention, that leads to disconnection, which leads to dysregulation which leads to disease. This is a big statement as there is so much that we could attend to within and without our bodies, such that we could almost make paying attention to our bodies a full-time event.

It also works on the other side; attention leads to connection. I guess it also can lead to amplification, pay attention to your hurt foot. So I guess attention needs to be moderated to enable connection. If I stare at someone that can be quite an aggressive connection.

The argument is that when we are healthy the brain\nervous system regulates the body. However some functions reach consciousness e.g. hunger. Sometimes managing the symptoms is an inattention to the feedback system, for instance if we eat too much food because we are stressed, and we get heart burn then the feedback loop to listen to is to reduce eating rather than taking antacid. Likewise work too much get headache take aspirin.

In mindfulness, we pay attention to the body, we observe it, we listen to it, and therefore we befriend it, as having a more granular appreciation of what the body is saying can lead to a more accurate response. So, we are caring more for it.

Again, the argument is wholeness is part of healing and disconnection relating to disease. This is a major statement as the body has a variety of systems in it, the body is part of several social systems, each body is part of meteorological systems, of systems of nature. Of systems of physics and chemistry. Depending on your perspective you can see many different systems we are part of.  

When we are aware of our thoughts, in mindfulness. This is tricky as a thought might refer to something, get its meaning within a context of other thoughts, and be doing something, setting up a certain relationship to self with the world. Thought is complex, is part of a complexity of meaningful systems.

 

Chapter 17 Stress

The word stress refers to both cause and effect. I have a lot of stress in my life that leads me to feel stressed. Ugly sentence but it shows the different usage.

Dr Seyle who coined the word stress, thought stress weakens the immune system.

Whilst demands and therefore stress is part of life, if stress is chronic\acute then the body will adapt to survive.

The significance of a stressor is modulated by the meaning we give it, seen as a challenge that will lead to growth as opposed to an oppressor will change  the unpleasantness of the stressor.

Some stressors given that they happen all the time, we adapt to and generally don’t notice e.g. gravity. We make adaptions to this, and it doesn’t cause stress.

Having a sense of control is a modulator to the level of stress. Learned helplessness is a sense of nothing we do matters.

Mindfulness gives options in terms of our internal reaction to an event. We can observe it, we can become curious about it, and engage with it from this side, from that side…

Stress is the appraisal that a relationship you have with your environment exceeds your resources and threatens your well-being.

I guess mindfulness opens possibilities, we can see more of our engagement with a situation. So, a car cuts me up, I can initially think he’s inconsiderate and get angry. But with mindfulness I can open to noticing a feeling of sadness of someone not caring about me, or fear  of threatening my well-being, I can remember times when I have been inconsiderate, and notice he is very much like me.

If stress relates to our resources, then increasing our bank account via sleep, intimacy, meditation and exercise can give more ability to cope. But how does meditation fill our bank account? I guess because with mindfulness we are more aware of what is, we might notice our thoughts about a situation and our emotions and in seeing those I guess we can question them. Are they relevant and proportionate to what is happening now? They might come from previous times in our lives when they were relevant.

Mindfulness helps us to experience more clearly, so we might see things that are adversity affecting us, bring consciousness to the unconscious and be more aware of things we are conscious of.

 

Chapter 18 Change, the one thing you can be sure of

To realise and accept that there is continual change, reduces stress and increases well-being as change isn’t seen as unusual\unfair just part of everyday life.

There is much birth and death, growth and decay within the body of cells and brain cells. Birth, change death, is the process of life, sometimes the slowness of change hides this but it is still there. The same is true for our environment as much as our bodies, all is change.

Claude Bernard argues that the internal systems in the body help manage the change from the external environment, food, temperature, predators and the like.

Allostasis is the process of predicting the environment, physiological\psychological that the body needs to adapt to, as opposed to responding to the environment, making errors and then correcting them.

Homeostasis refers to systems that relate to immediate survival, e.g. blood oxygen levels, whereas allostasis refers to longer term systems which have a greater ranger, e.g. cortisol levels, blood pressure and fat storage.

Telomeres is at the end of our chromosomes and can extend our life span.

There are so many systems in the body that operate automatically, for instance repair systems, the liver. WE can also affect these systems by our actions, smoking, drinking and the like, makes you wonder why we can make choices that hurt us?

Homeostasis means remaining stable by staying the same

Allostasis means remaining stable by being able to change

 

Chapter 19 Stuck in stress reactivity

Most change is handled automatically by the body, temperature, oxygen disease etc. with automatic systems. So, you could argue that most stressors are handled automatically.

It can be that are response to stress, in turn creates more problems. So, busyness, avoidance, use of substance and the like.

We can get external stressors, the tax bill, and internal stressors, thoughts of not feeling good enough.

You can distinguish between acute and chronic stressors. Acute can turn into chronic, via worry and rumination.

The ANS triggers the sympathetic system, which includes adrenaline, and hyperarousal to take in as much information as possible, so dilated pupils, scanning for danger, hair on the back of our neck standing up so we take in more of the vibrations in the air.  Heart rate increases, and more blood gets pumped up to 5 times! Our less important systems shut down, e.g. digestion and its for that reason we feel butterflies in our stomachs and blood gets re-routed.

The ANS regulates internal states of your body, including heart, digestion, breathing. The sympathetic branch speeds things up. The ANS is regulated by the hypothalamus.

Neuropeptides are chemical modulators that increase\decrease the chemicals released by neurones.

We can get chronically stressed, where we see many events as “life” threatening, or hugely significant when they aren’t, and there are many ways to address the problem.

Animals have social stress, which is about dominance and submission, and they fight to maintain their place in the pecking order, humans feel and respond the same way, but have many more options than dominance and submission.

The speed of the reaction of the SNS can cause the problem as it means we want to act quickly as things are life threatening rather than thoughtfully.

So, the idea here is that we can get into chronic stress, where the SNS is stuck on, and we react quickly but not cleverly and meditation can help slow us down.

Many people handle the feelings of stress, rather than their cause, and can get busy, which both reduces the feelings and gets them feeling they are doing something about their problems. They also use of substance, or reassurance, or denial and avoidance as stress symptom management.

An internalised stress response, i.e. you don’t fight or flight, wreaks havoc on your body and doesn’t discharge the increased activation via heart\lungs and muscles.

Chapter 20 Responding to stress as opposed to reacting

To be mindful with distress opens different ways to be with that pain and allows you to understand it differently.  One of the aspects of understanding differently, is to not take things so personally. When someone acts in a way that makes you angry, it might be more about them than it is about you.

Mindfulness encourages openness and curiosity to experience. Again, you can change your reaction to a situation, by being more aware and seeing for instance that some of your response might be a hangover because of something that happened earlier in the day.

Whilst Buddhism has a strong connection between meditation and compassion. It is also the case that mindfulness and MBSR can make this connection where through being more mindful you can be more engaged with your experience. In doing this then you will naturally be more compassionate as you will, be more responsive to what is happening.

To be mindful. To have a bit more of a pause before reaction takes practice! Remembering to do it is part of the practice, so realising you didn’t, can help.

Paying attention to the breath, can really help ground you, can help you pay attention in turn to your thoughts, emotions and bodily responds. It can give you a small pause to respond not to react.

 

 

Chapter 21 Working with symptoms: listening to your body

Getting rid of symptoms is a multi-billion dollar business, that sees symptoms as irrelevant inconveniences that we want to get rid of, as opposed to significant feedback from our body\and physical\psychological systems.

MBSR aims to focus more on what is right with the body as opposed to what is wrong.

MBSR aims to give wise attention to symptoms

We put out a welcome mat to whatever is there, we listen to the bodily symptoms, and the thoughts and emotions which come with them. 

The aim is to accept ourselves as we are now, pain or no pain. Accepting that we are whole as we are.

Pain is a message from your body which can be listened to, to just want to get rid of it without paying attention to the message is like when a king used to kill the messenger if they didn’t like the message.

If you have a headache, what is the sensation of it, what is your emotion, what happened before having the headache (sounds like therapy to me)

We personalise our experience, I am fat, I am cold, I am sick, where my body is fat/cold/sick

If we view symptoms as processes, then this encourages the temporary sense  of them.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 22 Working with Physical Pain: Your Pain Is Not You

There is your pain, and there is you, and your awareness, they are not the same. You can notice your pain and that starts to separate them.  Your awareness of pain, which isn’t in pain, can be a place of refuge.

Pain helps keep us safe. Acute pain is easier to treat. There is pain and there is suffering on top of it. Pain being the primary, suffering being all the secondary aspects. So, if you have a unpleasant feeling in your gut that is the primary pain, thinking that its cancer would be the suffering as it would increase the feeling. Suffering is your meaningful reaction to the pain, which also has feeling with it. If you pay attention to your body, your body will have a feeling because of that. So, if you stub your toe, and you pay strong attention to it, thinking how bad it is, and how it will interfere with your day and how the brick you stubbed it on  shouldn’t have been left there, then the feeling of the pain will increase. If you get a phone call and someone says you have won the lottery, your pain will decrease.

Acute pain tells us there is danger if you continue to do or not do something, e.g. hand on hot stoves, or haven’t eaten for a week. Pain is a very effective teacher, and most people would say pain is bad. To live with pain is to befriend it.  We as a society tend to avoid  the feeling of pain, so we reach for a tablet when there’s a headache, as opposed to asking what the danger signal is pointing to.

Pain memory is poor we remember the last feeling and the most intense feeling but not the bits in between.  So, we don’t remember the overall intensity and duration at all well.

If someone has a belief, that pain shows my body is broken as it is in pain and it needs to be fixed by someone, a doctor for instance, then that isn’t a great candidate for mindfulness training as you have to have some responsibility for your pain.

 

Pain study with meditation

Meditators felt as much intensity of pain but had less suffering. Less anticipatory suffering

MBSR aims to get you to turn towards your pain, on a moment-to-moment basis with great compassion as opposed to wanting to get rid of it.

Mindfulness helps to understand your pain more, which drugs or distraction can’t. This can really help you to learn how to live with your pain.

MBSR looks to uncouple sensation, emotions, and thoughts about the pain and to hold them as independent parts of experience.

Thinking yourself as a chronic pain patient sees you as passive  and you endure this thing this pain, it can be helpful to reframe to think yourself as a whole person who is facing their life with a chronic pain condition.

The body scan is the most effective mediation for chronic pain.

As you do a body scan and you have pain, notice the thoughts and emotions around it. “I can’t cope with this” , sadness: “why me”. These thoughts and feelings aren’t the pain, and they aren’t you either.

You label your pain as bad and want it to go away. But it doesn’t and you suffer because of this.

 

Is my awareness of pain in pain

Is my awareness of my sadness sad?

When you identify with your thoughts, emotions and pain there is more suffering than when you inhabit the domain of awareness of them.

 

You can let all of yourself go, your concepts about yourself, your identity, and you can rest in pure being, pure awareness.

 

You are not your thoughts or emotions they change, the only thing that is constant is the awareness you have of everything.

I am not my body as my body changes, if I am not my body, I am not my pain. I feel it sure, but it is not me.

 

So, the mindfulness approach to pain is 3-fold.

Firstly, within awareness then it looks to separate pain from suffering, looking to be aware of the pure sensation of pain and to just be with that, befriend it, and to let go all the other thoughts and judgements about the pain, the suffering.

Secondly it looks to notice that awareness isn’t in pain, or anything else. So, we  look to dwell in awareness.

Thirdly it looks to be compassionate to the pain, although this is tricky as some compassion would really want to get rid of it, and even acknowledgements of this really hurts again moves past what there is here, with this stiff ache, or however your pain shows.  I guess maybe there is some sense of I’m finding it hard to be with this.

Fourthly (!!) There is being more active with your pain, noticing the I’m a passive victim and isn’t life hard, to rather befriending your pain, noticing its sensation and then asking yourself what the message of this pain is, and what would be a helpful response.

Fifthly(!!) Mindfulness pays attention to the whole sensation of the pain; this is standardly different to how our minds work. We remember the most intense and the level of the last sensation, not the overall sensation of the pain. So, if a pain was intense brief, then low level, and finished with intense but brief, we would remember it as an awful pain.

Sixthly (!!!) expecting there to be no pain, will cause it to hurt more when it’s not gone (suffering)

Seventhly (!!!) Asking yourself “how bad is this pain is right now, can I be with it right now in this moment”, again can reduce the pain, as it is the threat of the pain from the future, which can be especially painful.

 

If you think of your body as  a machine, then you want an expert to fix it, If you are still in pain then they have failed. However pain is your bodies signal to yourself of danger, it doesn’t mean that the signal is correct.

 

Mindfulness I guess is about nonbeing. There is awareness. My thoughts are not me; my bodily sensations are not me, my emotions are not me. Working with pain is to enhance this, I am not my pain.

 

Chapter 23 More on working with pain

Chronic pain: you can expect pain to come, so even when there is no pain you feel precarious and insecure. Chronic pain affects what you can do and affects the network of people around you.  You might do things to protect yourself, walk\sit etc in certain ways.

If you have a good day, you can be exuberant and then overdo it and then pay for it later, thus you have a boom-and-bust cycle.

Don’t stop looking after your whole body because of your pain.

Breathe into the area of pain and imagine\visualise the pain softening as the air comes out.

Set long term goals, what could I look like in a year, if I adopt a regular programme to look after my whole body, including the injured part.

Notice when the thought “I can’t” is around as it becomes  as self-fulfilling prophecy via “I won’t”

 

Headaches: it can be helpful to use the “hole in the head” approach from the body scan to allow breathe to come in and out of a headache.

 

Chapter 24 Working with emotional pain

Awareness is like the sky is to the weather, its where the weather happens.

With pain, be it emotional or physical the key is to rest in awareness. To befriend, and welcome and get to know your pain.  The more you do of this, describing it, observing, the more you are resting in awareness. This is a place that doesn’t hurt, so it will diminish the pain by being in there.

Being mindful about your emotional pain might be also to be aware of its components: what makes this pain so strong, and when there are answers to that be mindful: the event that my friend was rude to me, again just notice that event, your thoughts, and feelings around that, just observe.

Noticing how you respond to your pain and separating that out from the pain itself, again can lessen it through lessening the suffering.

Notice how your pain may relate to that things aren’t how you would like them, and you might blame yourself or someone else for this. You might feel badly treated by life or by yourself or others.

We reject things when they are my pain, my sadness etc. This then sees pain due to our separateness. When you allow the event to be connected to a larger whole, it can change your feelings of pain, as it is made sense of within the whole, not just its mine.

The idea here is to accept what has happened and to observe it. It doesn’t mean you like it, it doesn’t mean you don’t want to stop it happening again if you can. Acceptance is the experience of engaging with the fact that this event has happened. You can’t deny it, it’s there. But it is in the past.

 

Being mindful with emotions, means noticing the feeling, noticing the thoughts, notice how they change, their nature, frequency, intensity. How they come and go.

This puts mindfulness not in the moment, but rather allows views on events to happen, to be like an audience as they watch the show that is you,

Whatever is happening will pass.

 

We suffer as things don’t go our way. But often we don’t know what that way is. Also, if we get what we want, we then want something else!

So, one question you can ask, is “What is my way, how do I want things to go”, the answer to this question can be I want things to go as they are, this is my way, and with it comes pain.

When you fully accept that this is your life, as it is, with this pain, this then can help you see a way through the pain to what you need for healing.

Sitting with the pain mindfully doesn’t mean to explain it, it’s just to see with the experience of the pain

Problem focused and pain focused are two ways in which you can engage with the problem. There is the problem and this was a part of the creation of your emotion (but not all). So there are two things the problem and your emotion.

Splitting the problem like this, then you might ask to the problem what might be helpful. And then be mindful with the emotion, which can have the effect of reducing the suffering

Taking this parallel track, you need to ensure that you don’t have one dominant track, some people are problem solvers, other people focus on emotions

If there is something to do to improve the problem do it, if there is nothing to do to improve the problem do nothing!

For the emotion, notice how it feels, how it changes. Notice any dominant thoughts that help explain, it . Imagine that you are comforting your feelings like a crying child

Some of the power of observing is the confirmation to yourself that you can stand and weather this storm, you can observe because your legs are strong.

 

 

Chapter 25 Working with Fear, Panic, and Anxiety

Anxiety is common, a feeling that I’m not safe.

People manage this by avoiding, denying, being aggressive, but avoiding your feelings is avoiding your inner life.

Mindfulness as an approach to anxiety observes it, the affect, the physical feeling, the thoughts. It gets to know it.

When we have the feeling of fear that something bad can happen, the worst thing to do is panic, as it is in this fearful time that we most need to have our wits about us.

Mindfulness can help panic attacks as it notices the symptom\thought rather than identifying with a panicking interpretation such as I’m going to faint, have a heart attack.

Affective realism, emotional reasoning. Anxiety is the feeling I’m not safe and believing the feeling \though to be true.  Mindfulness can be with the sensation, see it changing, can get to know it better. Maybe part of what is helpful about mindfulness is that it does pay attention to the feeling that I have, and it could slightly divorce your feeling from the world.

Mindfulness can help with anxiety, as it can through simple observation show that we don’t have to act on the feeling, we can sit with it and therefore tolerate it.

It can also help with anxiety as it can reduce the identification with any meta thoughts about the anxiety, I can’t cope, I will faint.

Mindfulness through observation also shows you that you are not your anxiety. Giving yourself some distance allows you to be in relationship with it, and to show you that your anxiety isn’t as dominating as you might have thought as part of you is also observing it.  In observing it you also see its impermanence as you notice how it changes.  In doing this, you can reduce how much you take your emotions personally, I am my anxiety, I caused my anxiety, I’ve done something wrong, something bad will happen.

Mindfulness can go under our sensations, by observing them. This is different from the standard way of acting on them or trying to get rid of them.

Mindfulness drops into your core of awareness, the observing state that is still and dependable. Doing this allows you to ride the choppy waters of difficult emotions.

One key aspect of mindfulness is disidentification, you are not your thoughts\feelings, they come to you, they happen, and you can observe them, you do no need to be tyrannized by them.

If you do not feed your thoughts \emotions, they will arise then they will go.

Treating a thought as a thought, means that you experience it less

 

Mindfulness then weakens anxiety, as one anxious thought is experienced and leads to another anxious thought. Mindfulness breaks that chain, noticing the thought as  a thought.

The argument is that mindfulness doesn’t prevent action on strong emotions. It observes, it is aware, and when it becomes the right time, it acts.

 

The fundamental pattern of life is to get what we want and hold onto it, to keep what we don’t want away from us and keep it there, and to find better things than we already have.

 

Chapter 26 Time and Time Stress

With the digital global age, we are 247 available\engaged. We work with different time zones, have friends there too, the digital machine works 247, there is no stop.  Things are happening faster and all the time.  The speed of interactions on text, social media and the like lead to a less aware, less mindful interaction, where you react rather than respond.

The antidote to time stress is non doing. The idea being whilst time happens in past, present and future. The moment that we experience, is always here, and can be seen as outside time.

Of course, Heidegger amongst others would disagree, seeing that temporality needs a merging in the present of past, present and future, so that it is temporal and moves. The desk in front of me has both history and future.

 

Non-doing can help with both time stress and time boredom, so too much or too little to do.  This can be done by stepping out of time, which has desire\aversion and into being mindful in the moment, where you are complete.

 

In boredom, you may well be ruminating, feeling sorry for yourself, angry at yourself\others. Boredom doesn’t seem a pure state, it is a not enjoying what you are doing, and then doing a whole bunch of things internally.

 

Time seems linked to activity. We think about the past, measure the present and anticipate when the future might come.  JKZ thinks time is measured between thoughts, so if we observe thoughts, we suspend time, this is something which needs a bit more thinking, I think.

Non doing is a letting go of our attachment, our desires and aversion.  Theres a wholeness in non-doing where you neither desire, nor feel aversion, where you are complete as you are.

An antidote to boredom can be non-doing, where you can feel complete, and get to know yourself in a different way.

With mindful awareness you can let doing come out of being.

We play whack a mole, trying to do more and more, off the never ending to do list.  But in doing that we lost sight of ourselves who is doing, the doing.

Rapidity loses connection with what is. So, it can lead to poor decisions, low relationship connection and low satisfaction. Is life a competition? Is life a race? Will you be pleased on your death bed that you succeed against others?

Time pressure is the question of business. How can we get more for less, how can we squeeze more out of less time, from people, be they employees, customers or suppliers.

Hurry up, there is never enough time, you need to do more, get more, be more. The shuddering instance of our culture.

In earlier times the rhythm of life was the rhythm of nature.

Time is a product of thought, and therefore a social convention.  We all have 24 hours a day, and who we engage with that determines, if we have enough, too much  or enough time.

You can also free yourself from time by living in the present more, and reducing worrying about the future, or ruminating about the past. Likewise, fully absorb with what you are doing, and time will disappear. As you do things mindfully you will engage\enjoy with these things and they won’t seem like taking time from  you.

It can also help to simplify your time, notice all the things you are doing, and reduce to the most important. I guess you might also ask yourself why each of them is important and if this was a friend what you would say to them.

 

Chapter 27 Sleep and Sleep stress

Our sleep cycle is connected to the natural world, the earth turns in a 24-hour cycle and has light and dark during that time, awake and asleep. Our biological clock, our circadian clock uses hormones to regulate wake and sleep, cortisol and adenosine.

Sleep is a sign you are in harmony with your life (?), you can’t make sleep come, you can’t go to sleep, rather it seems you can let sleep come over you, you let go into sleep.

Regular exercise really helps you sleep!

Some people can get by on less sleep. There is pain that is experienced thinking I should be sleeping but I’m not, maybe get up and do something you enjoy doing instead of sleeping.

Meditating can help return to sleep.

Forcing yourself to try and sleep doesn’t help, so if you don’t feel like sleeping then do something else. Catastrophising about how bad the day will be doesn’t help and you don’t know if its true.

Buddhism is an aim to be fully awake. In mindfulness you look to enhance your awareness, which leads to being fully awake.  So, when you can’t sleep be aware of that, be aware of your agitation, just observe it. Sleep will come in its way, just maybe not as you think it should.

A breathing meditation where you breathe out to the ends of the universe and  then from there into your body, can sometimes help to get to sleep.

The body and mind can self-regulate themselves.

If you wake in the middle of the night, be aware of that experience, the stillness, the drowsiness, be fully aware of that experience. Doing this reduces the suffering.

 

Chapter 28 People stress

Psychological stress results from our interaction with the world.  So when a person causes us stress we need to take responsibility for our side of the stress.

We have habits to manage conflict: some avoid, pacify, placate, please, do anything to have conflict.  Some cause conflict to get a sense of power and control.

When we feel our interests or social status are threatened, we try to defend them\it, or we can be submissive.

Communication is a union of minds; it doesn’t mean an agreement. What can be helpful is to be aware of the whole, which includes the view of the other.  If we are absorbed by our own thoughts, it is impossible to be aware of the others and therefore impossible to have communication.  We will also be easily threatened by people who don’t see things our way, maybe in this absorption because this is all there is. Our views don’t relate to anything else, so they are easily threatened.

Theres my thought, and your thought and the system in which they both exist. Whole system thinking helps communication.

If you’re stuck between ideas, look at the system, the context in which the ideas exist.

In argument, as with aikido, you can use the others energy\anger. Anger can be a desire for connection, which If you avoid can be frustrating. If you oppose the anger, it can intensify.

Entering and blending: Aware of the stressor without losing  the grounding of our whole  body. So, we also see the whole situation and are grounded in our breathing of our body.

On a physical level this is stepping in and  to the side of the attacker and taking their hand and moving closer to them.  You avoid a head on collision and take the same perspective as the attacker. At this moment you become partners not adversaries.  Possibilities from here, is you can use their energy to turn them so they can see things as you see things.

Enter and blend, is to step in, take hold, and firstly see things from the others perspective and then what happens next is uncertain, but you haven’t lost your ground.

Being assertive means being aware of your feelings and acting on them neither ignoring them and being passive or overreacting and being aggressive. Feelings are just feelings they are neither good nor bad.

 

Chapter 29 Role Stress

We can get stuck in roles, how we should act, which gets in the way of how we actually feel and can mould attitudes and behaviours.  We act how we think the role should be.

We have roles, we have rules that make us good or bad, and we get pleasure or pain from that.  Roles can convey identity and power.

You can also believe that other people in your role, or other roles, don’t have your problems. Speaking to others who suffer can be healing.

Roles can also be confining if you identify too heavily in them, as the expense of other parts of your life. Likewise you can get locked into a certain aspect of your role, which you really like and then try to continue that even when its not merited, so create high pressured situations as you like them.

 

Chapter 30 Work stress

Work with low autonomy and high-performance standards, correlate with a higher prevalence of heart attacks.  

Even if you have autonomy the law of impermanence can always affect you and you can lose control in your job.

Strategic renewal=naps, breaks, rejuvenating activities, longer sleep,  boosts productivity.

We can act on auto pilot, and habit, as it is easier, but then it becomes boring and repetitive.

Being mindful opens the possibilities of what we do, and how we do it.

Awareness for work

1.      Wake up take a few moments to realise you are deciding to go to work today and what you are intending to do

2.      Be aware of the process of preparing for work, showering etc

3.      When you say goodbye to your partner, do it mindfully, slow down

4.      Travelling to work, be aware of the journey, of how you journey

5.      At work, be aware of your body, if there is tension in it let it go

6.      If you walk at work, do it slowly aware of your walking

7.      When working try doing one thing at a time mindfully without distraction

8.      Take frequent breaks: do breathing, relax your body

9.      Spend time with people you like\trust

10. Exercise, it’s a greater antidote to stress

11. Stop for a minute an hour and just pay attention to your breathing

12. As you leave, travel end work, again do this mindfully

 

Chapter 31 Food stress

We have a global diet and can eat from anywhere in the world. We can eat most foods in various ways, readymade, in a restaurant, delivered to our house, or the ingredients to cook.  We are no longer tied by season and country to what we eat, or indeed when.  Foods are also heavily manipulated, whereas previously we would have eaten what came out of the ground, or out of the animal.

There is a massive network from farm\factory via transportation, to shops to larder\refrigerator to microwave.

Our food problems now have moved from starving and not having enough, to having too much and more importantly the wrong kind of food, we are not eating healthily.  We suffer from obesity, type 2 diabetes, and all the problems that come from that.

Our health is threatened by the amount of chemical we ingest, either the fertilisers of the agribusiness or the preservatives in our food.

Michael Pollen=” Eat food, mostly plants, not too much”

The joy of being part of a work community and the joy of being part of a community at home when you sit down to eat.

We mostly eat to manage emotions,  fill up time, and out of habit its almost rarely to satisfy hunger.

We can go on elaborate diets, then binge on the things we have been depriving ourselves of. What we need is an awareness of our eating, when, why, how does it feel during and after. Awareness too of what we are putting in our body.

Tips for mindful eating

1.      Bring awareness to eating

2.      Slow down when you eat

3.      When you buy look at the labels

4.      When you prepare be mindful, and notice where these ingredients come from

5.      If you have a craving for food, ask yourself what’s the craving for and will this food give it to you

6.      Notice the before and after experience of food

7.      Listen to your body before and after eating

 

 

Chapter 32 World Stress

When the human mind knows itself, we get beauty, art, technology.

When it doesn’t, we get oppression, violence, destruction.

This is quite a simple statement, that is really saying mindfulness is great, but its not really a meaningful argument.

Irony: we ban pesticides in our domestic food production, but then export them to countries where we import our food from, so we get the pesticides back in our bodies.

The planet is a dynamic allostatic system, much like the human body. It can be stressed, break down like our bodies.

We can raise the temperature of the planet, deplete the ozone layer and pollute the air and water that we ingest.

There can be an increase in skin cancers due to depletion of the ozone layer.

One atom of plutonium can kill you and we have made many tons of it, and several hundred pounds of it have disappeared from stockpiles.

Should we be aware of the information we ingest as much as the food?

We hear bad\horrible news with no ability to influence it.

Maybe this makes us less sensitive to others as we exist within this sea of violence and disaster.

In our minds are the residue of all the adverts, all the bad news, and it swims around in there.

For many children real life pales into comparison to digital excitement, and indeed content creators ramp up the extremity to hold their interest.

The constant agitation of our mind\or our being is increased by a digital diet. We are shovelling in more things to think about, worry about. Its not that we don’t have enough already!

It is out of our engagement with our present that the future gets created.

Monitor your engagement with the news and digital media. Your experience before, during and after. Is there something you can do, in an area that you care about to make a difference? Doing something can really help reduce your anxiety about the world.

 

Chapter 33 New Beginnings

Meditate as if your life depends on it, meditate with the loneliness of the long-distance meditator

Chapter 34  Keeping up formal practice

Mindfulness sitting in awareness, like sitting with cloudy apple juice that gradually clears.

Breathing meditation, a being with, an experiencing your breath.

Alternatively, you can watch your thoughts, experience them

The important thing is awareness, not the object of awareness be it, thought or breath.

Thinking you need to get somewhere with meditation can seriously damage your practice.

As soon as the mind comments on an experience it makes it into something else.

When the desire to tell other people how wonderful meditation is, the best idea, is to put that energy into practice.

 

Chapter 35 Keeping up informal practice

Mindfulness=paying attention, on purpose in the present moment non judgementally.

Awareness means seeing the whole, the whole context of the present moment.

Mindfulness means going up the stairs and knowing you are going up the stairs, being with that.

Mindfulness is non conceptual knowing, being aware with all the senses.

 

Chapter 36 The way of awareness

The way is the Tao word for the unfolding of being according to its own lawfulness.  Can you live with how things are . There are many ways as there are customs and beliefs

You can’t fail with meditation it is beyond success and failure, and observes our sensation of them should they arise.

Mindfulness is a lifetime journey that leads you nowhere, only to who you are.