FPIAFW - Week 8: Your Wild & Precious Life

[JonW]

As we begin the adventure that is mindfulness we become acutely aware of how we've been living our lives up to this point. Not least we start to realise how little pause we have allowed ourselves to reflect on the good things that have happened to us or the things we have succeeded in. As Williams and Penman write, "We often rush from task to task, so much so that the end of one task is just the invitation to start another. There are no gaps in between in which we could take even a few seconds to sit, to take stock, to realise that we have just completed something. Just the reverse: how many times do we hear ourselves say, "I haven't achieved anything at all today?' And we say this most often when things have been at their busiest. Is there an alternative approach?"
In eight week of the course, we learn to cultivate a sense of completeness in terms of the little things in life, taking pause to appreciate where we are at in the moment, rather than rush on the next thing, or dwell on the idea that things could be different, could be better.
We're asked to reflect on the lessons we have learned in the previous seven weeks and to take stock of how far we've come.
As the authors write, "Finding peace in a frantic world is not easy. In our darkest hours it can seem as if the entire world has been designed from the ground up to maximise our distress and drive us to exhaustion. Stress and anxiety can seem overwhelming and full-blown depression can appear to be only a hair's breadth away."
By week eight we might have started to appreciate that many of our troubles arise from the way we live our lives. Human beings have a knack of getting in their own way, making their lives unnecessarily difficult, to the point where maybe we resign ourselves to the idea that stress, unhappiness and exhaustion are simply states that we can do nothing about.
In week eight, perhaps we can ask ourselves what kind of difference mindfulness is making to our lives. Perhaps we're able to see that mindfulness is about becoming fully aware of the life we've already got, rather than the life we wish we had; that mindfulness enables us to bring kindly awareness to the forces that drive us. Slowly but surely, perhaps we begin to notice that we feel less negativity, that we spend less time getting lost in our thoughts, that we spend more time enjoying the moment.
Williams and Penman make the point that week eight of the course is the rest of your life and suggest that the task now is to weave the practices learned in week one to seven into a routine that is sustainable in the long term.
So, in week eight, there are no hard or fast rules about which practices to adopt. From this point, the challenge is to find a daily routine that you're comfortable with and which help you maintain mindfulness throughout as much of your daily life as possible.

[FeeHutch]

I found such freedom in this quote:

"Finding peace in a frantic world is not easy. In our darkest hours it can seem as if the entire world has been designed from the ground up to maximise our distress and drive us to exhaustion. Stress and anxiety can seem overwhelming and full-blown depression can appear to be only a hair's breadth away."

It felt like permission to find the world frantic and overwhelming but not an excuse to succumb to it. Knowing that other people found the world as challenging as I did was a comfort, knowing these same people have managed to find peace all the same was inspiring. I have a great fondness for the body and breath meditation, it is the one I keep returning too. It feels like it wakes me up again every time I do it.

I hope posting these threads up over the last 8 weeks has been as useful for those of you reading as I have found it contributing to them. The posts will remain here now so that hopefully anyone joining our community at any time can contribute their own thoughts and experiences too.

[JonW]

What Fee said.
Until I started practicing mindfulness I had no idea how overwhelming my thoughts and feeling were, and had been since childhood. As I've described elsewhere, it was as if I'd stepped out of a car in the middle of a busy motorway. I realised that I'd begun to take my frantic state of mind for granted, having reasoned that there was nothing I could do to change it.
Mindfulness brought about a monumental change in how I related to myself and to the world. It continues to bring positive changes by the day.
Daily practice is key, I feel.
And self-compassion at all times.

[Gareth]

These topics have been great. I think they will be of massive benefit to people in the weeks and months to come.

[JonW]

Oddly enough, after posting the last message, I picked up a book by Gary Weber (Happiness Beyond Thought) and read the following passage which is nothing if not apposite:
"For a long time my thoughts were like one those horror movies where thoughts are birds and I am trapped in a phone booth being attacked by flocks of them. Now, it is an empty sky with the occasional few birds flying across high up and not landing."
It should be noted that this change doesn't happen overnight. Weber himself is a long-term meditator and this change would have occurred over a long period. But I'm sure anyone who has practiced mindfulness for a period of time will be able to identify with that stark image. My own life seems to become less like a Hitchcock film every day.

[FeeHutch]

My own life seems to become less like a Hitchcock film every day.

Which in my experience of Hitch's films can only ever be a good thing

[Gareth]

Daily practice is key, I feel.

It is critically important. Only when I began meditating every day did these enormous benefits come to me. I just don't know how critical the formal meditation is these days. I have been practising for quite a while now, and the informal practice gets so much easier. I find myself practising all the time, albeit in informal way. Very rarely these days do I get lost in thought (in a bad way). I still meditate every day because it's such a small price to pay, and I wouldn't want these benefits to ever go away.