A former journalist and magazine editor, Ed Halliwell began practicing meditation in 2002 and is now a renowned UK-based mindfulness teacher and writer. As a partner in Mindfulness Sussex, he leads workshops, courses and retreats in the SE of England.
Along with Dr. Jonty Heaversedge, he is the co-author of the critically acclaimed book, The Mindful Manifesto: How Doing Less And Noticing More Can Treat Illness, Relieve Stress And Help Us Cope With The 21st Century.
He is the author of the Mental Health Foundation’s Be Mindful report, and is co-director of The Mindfulness Initiative, which is working with the Mindfulness All- Party Parliamentary group to bring mindfulness into public policy.
In 2015, he published his first solo book, Mindfulness: How To Live Well By Paying Attention.
In 2016 he published another highly acclaimed book, Into The Heart Of Mindfulness: Finding A Way Of Well-being.
Ed was interviewed by Jon Wilde on three occasions for this piece, most recently at the Regency Tavern public house in Brighton in June 2016. Jon drank beer. Ed was driving so stuck, sensibly and mindfully, to sparkling water.
EVERYDAY MINDFULNESS: You have said in the past, perhaps only half-jokingly, that you came to mindfulness in the first place through the nervous breakdown route. In your new book, Into The Heart Of Mindfulness, you offer a fairly harrowing account of that extended breakdown.
ED HALLIWELL: It was harrowing to live. I was in my mid-twenties and, on the face of it, I was living an enviable life, working as deputy editor for one of the biggest-selling lifestyle magazines in Europe. But all was not well under the surface. Increasingly, I felt lonely, frightened and anxious. For a long time I kept that hidden. I did start to wonder whether anything would ever help get me out of this horrible mess. I’d start thinking, “Maybe this is what it’s going to be like for the rest of my life.” I was desperate to feel better and, of course, the desperation itself was a giant hindrance to getting better.
It was horrible for a long time in terms of the non-stop mental and physical agony that depression creates: a constant feeling of panic and fear; an inability to manage day-to-day living; endless nagging worries about the future? My relationships were a mess which shouldn’t have been too surprising because my relationship with myself was such a mess.
I was lucky in that I had a lot of help and support from family and friends. Most of the time I managed to keep working. I had somewhere to live and could afford the roof over my head most of the time. But it wasn’t much better than getting by a lot of the time. It went on and on. A continual torment.
Things got so bad I had to sign off work. During that time I read all the self-help books I could find. I was seeing a therapist, taking anti-depressants, attending support groups and trying all sorts of alternative treatments? I was willing to try anything which, in a way, was a good thing because everything I tried I approached with an open mind. But none of it was working.
I could tip into depression very easily. I would watch football on the television and have this existential sense that the game didn’t matter, that my life didn’t matter. I started to wonder where I was going to be in two or three years time, in ten years time. None of it felt sustainable and I felt a great deal of panic. It got to the point where I realised that things were very, very wrong.
EM: How did you get into meditation?
EH: Some people suggested I give meditation a try and so I went to a local centre that offered instruction. Initially I approached meditation like everything else, throwing myself into it in the hope that I’d finally found an answer to my problems. After a while it dawned on me that the way I was approaching everything was a big part of the problem. I was over-thinking everything and trying to control my experience. I was incapable of simply being.
As with everything else in my life I was setting myself a goal and driving myself to reach that goal. When things didn’t go the way I wanted them to, I carried on with the same approach, hoping it would all go away. Einstein once said that you can’t solve a problem from the same mindset that created it. But that’s exactly what I was trying to do. I was trying to solve the problem of my frantic mind by applying that frantic mind to the problem and only succeeding in making things worse.
Once I started getting the hang of meditation and began marinating in mindfulness, it was absolutely clear to me that this is what I’d been looking for all along. That hasn’t changed in fifteen years.
EM: Did you have any doubts about writing with such raw emotional honesty about your struggles with anxiety and depression in your third book?
EH: Not really. I had this book in mind for a long time. I was thinking about it even before I wrote the other two. I wanted to write a mindfulness book unlike any of the others that are out there. I wanted to show what mindfulness practice can be like over the long-term, to show that it’s anything but a quick fix.
My feeling is that there aren’t enough stories out there. When you read a book that teaches the eight-week course, it can look quite easy, a fairly straightforward matter of following instructions. But, as anyone who has been taught the eight-week course in a group will tell you, it’s not simply a matter of ticking the boxes week by week.
Mindfulness was a slow process for me and I found it as difficult as I found it transformative. To get that across, I felt I needed to explain what had actually happened to me.
EM: When did you first start to notice that things were beginning to change positively for you?
EH: I first started to practice meditation in 2001 but it wasn’t until the end of 2002 that I began to meditate on a regular basis. I was sitting in the bath one morning in August 2003 and it dawned on me that, for the first time in a long while, I wasn’t depressed. I actually felt OK and I’d forgotten what that felt like. I was pretty sure that my meditation practice had a lot to do with that. I began to see that mindfulness was giving me some much-needed breathing space.
EM: Early on, did you experience any setbacks in your mindfulness practice?
EH: To begin with it wasn’t a case of, “Wow, I feel so much better.” At the start meditation made me realise how terrible I felt. But I had the sense that this was the first approach that really made me feel I was looking at how I was feeling. Until that point I’d always been looking for somebody or something to sort me out, whether it was a doctor or a pill. With meditation it felt like I was in charge of the process.
Previously, everything I’d tried to do was about striving. It was a huge relief to see that meditation was a practice that was telling me not to get anywhere.
I soon realised that I couldn’t make meditation into another fix. I wasn’t meditating to sort myself out. Mindfulness wasn’t about getting rid of my stress and my feelings of depression. It was about meeting those feelings with gentle curiosity. I learned that I had to give up looking for answers that came from outside, that I needed to start working with suffering in the heart of my experience. As that began to happen I realised that, for the first time, I was practicing something that wasn’t about the result. It was just about being here. Even when I was feeling sad, angry, depressed or whatever, from the point of view of meditation it was OK to be having that experience. I started to grasp what Jon Kabat-Zinn meant when he said, “If you’re breathing, then there’s more right with you than wrong with you.”
EM: When did mindfulness become your career?
EH: In 2006 I spent a year living and working at Dechen Choling, a retreat centre in central France. When I returned I began writing regularly about meditation for The Guardian. In 2010, after training as a meditation instructor in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, I began leading MBSR (mindfulness-based stress reduction) courses and retreats.
EM: For somebody starting out in mindfulness, how important is the eight-week course?
EH: It’s important to have good training and that’s what the eight-week course offers. Having said that, I didn’t learn about mindfulness through a course. When I started out I didn’t know the course existed. I went to my local meditation centre. There were instructors there who offered to help me learn to meditate.
The genius of the eight-week course is that it has such a strong structure. It takes many of the key points about meditation practice and teaches them in such a way that is very open but also very carefully considered. It’s a brilliant model.
EM: It strikes me that the course doesn’t spell things out too much, that much is left to the individual’s discretion.
EH: That’s true and it’s important because a lot of what you’re learning you’re not getting at a cognitive level. In order for mindfulness to become embodied, you’ve got to be able to make your own connections by experiencing it.
You could go to a class where you’re told that you’re not your thoughts, that it’s good to pay attention and be open to your experience. But what good is that going to do? Those are only vague concepts. On the eight-week course you gradually open up to the possibilities of seeing your whole world differently by seeing what works for you. But it’s important to remember that people come to the course for all kinds of different reasons. Most of them are wanting something to change. It could be that their lives are not going the way they wanted. For others, it’s more like a rumbling, like something rumbling under the floorboards that’s telling them things aren’t quite right.
EM: Are there people who do the eight-week course and then discontinue their practice?
EH: That does happen, yes. Some people decide that they’ve got what they needed and they don’t want to devote more time to mindfulness at this stage in their life. But that’s not to say they won’t pick it up again at a later stage. Some people drop out of a course as they decide for one reason or another that it’s not for them. But there’s no bad reason for dropping out of a course. That’s the choice that somebody has made. It’s all about choices. For all the benefits that mindfulness has brought me, I realise there’s no point in shouting it from the rooftops. I’m not going to start preaching, “This has worked for me so it’s bound to work for you.” That would be enough to put someone off it for decades. The most you can say is, “I’ve been practicing and it’s been very helpful for me.” But it’s not something that needs to be sold. If people want to understand what mindfulness is, they have to engage with it themselves and practice it regularly.
It’s important to remember that everybody is different. Some people are naturally more mindful than others.
EM: Is it possible for someone to successfully teach themselves?
EH: Mindfulness is not unlike most other skills. If you want to become a good potter, pianist or tennis player, you’re unlikely to get there very quickly if you teach yourself. It’s not impossible. But, generally speaking, it’s better to have someone you can talk to about stuff that’s coming up when you’re practicing.
It is possible to learn about mindfulness from a good book. But attending a course offers an experience that no book can hope to do. First of all you’ve got a live teacher who has been practicing for a while and who is able to offer themselves as support and guidance. A book can’t answer your questions, neither can a guided meditation CD. Also being part of a group gives you a sense that you’re not the only person who has a racing mind or who is reacting to stress.
Meditation gave me the tools to enable me to look at what was going on in my life. It also gave me the space in which to look around and see what was happening. Other people can open up that space for you but you can’t get that from a book. A book or a guided CD might be able to point you towards it but there’s something very different about a live interaction when you’re working with other human beings. In a group situation you’re about to see the commonality. One person in the group may have had problems with depression, another may be in chronic pain, another may be lost and not know what to do with their life. You begin to realise that all these issues have threads in common. They’re about how the mind and body work. They ask the question: how can we relate to these problems in a way that reduces suffering and leads to a greater sense of wellbeing?
EM: One of the first things we learn on a mindfulness course is, “you are not your thoughts.” Why do you think so many people struggle initially to grasp this concept?
EH: It’s a very subtle idea. Some people hear that idea and leap to the conclusion that mindfulness is about getting our thoughts to stop which is not the case at all. Mindfulness is not about demonising thoughts. Thinking can be a useful tool but life can become difficult when we become ruled by our thoughts.
As Mark Williams puts it, the thinking mind is like a discrepancy monitor. It’s constantly looking for what is wrong and what needs to be sorted. That way of thinking comes in very handy if you’re trying to fix a car. Human beings are not machines and emotions are not jump leads. Dealing with bereavement or a relationship break-up is not like fixing a car. They’re human experiences that are not fixable in that way. But we’re hardwired to sort our emotions out as though we’re trying to get a car back on the road.
EM: What are the common obstacles that people encounter on courses?
EH: Some people get confused by the simplicity of it. To say to people, “let this be,” that sounds like heresy for some. How can you just let a thought be when you hate how it’s making you feel? You want it to stop right now. So you go about trying to sort it out by pushing the thought away or fighting with your own emotions and, quite often, that prolongs the agony. It often happens that if you just let the thought or feeling be, it goes away. Or it resolves itself in its own time. It’s about knowing the difference between what we can do something about and what we can’t.
The neurologist Viktor Frankl famously said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” When we’re living on automatic pilot, we’re just going straight from impulse to action all the time. On a rough day, you might be walking down the street and see someone on the other side of the road who you recognize. You wave at them and they don’t wave back. There might be many reasons why they haven’t waved back. Maybe they’re short-sighted. But it would be easy to leap to the wrong conclusion, decide that the person doesn’t like you, and allow that thought to spoil your whole day. That can easily happen if you’re not seeing all the projections you’re having about that person. And a projection like that doesn’t only spoil your day. By the time you get to the supermarket you might be in a really bad mood and find yourself being rude to the check-out person. In turn that person goes home all upset and maybe takes it out on their partner. So just by being more aware of what’s going on in our own daily lives, maybe the lives of others we interact with are changed for the better in some small way.
Of course, it’s as much about the body as it’s about the mind. When I started meditating, I began paying conscious attention to my body. I started to become aware of tensions in my shoulders and jaw that had probably always been there without my noticing. In general I realised that my body was a lot more stressed than I’d ever realised. I started to listen more to my body, looking out for the warning signs that told me I needed to slow down. I started thinking of it more as a body and less of a machine.
EM: Are there any hard or fast rules about how regularly someone should practice?
EH: Ultimately it comes down to you. If you’re willing to put your time and energy into this, then you will probably connect with it in a deeper way than if you just do one minute a day. Then again, one minute a day is all some people want. That’s a good start. It’s certainly better than no minutes a day. At his clinics, Jon Kabat-Zinn recommends 45 minutes of practice per day and, as he explains, that’s because he figured that would be long enough for people to start to get uncomfortable. He feels that it’s important for people to meet their boredom and frustration, so they ask themselves, “Can I stay with this?” A three-minute meditation is unlikely to bring anybody to that point. In three minutes you might feel a bit more relaxed. You might feel a certain stillness. But the more you can turn towards this way of being, the more it seems to open up.
EM: Jon Kabat-Zinn’s famous definition of mindfulness runs as follows: The awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment.
Would you add anything to that?
EH: I’ve adapted that definition a little. Mindfulness is the awareness and the approach to life that arises from paying attention on purpose, fully present, with curiosity and kindness.
The big difference in that definition is the explicit mention of the approach to life. Mindfulness is whatever helps us cultivate wellbeing in ourselves and in the world around us. It’s important I feel to remind people that mindfulness is not passive, selfish or insular. In its capacity to help us bring attention to experience, courage to presence and skill to behaviour, mindfulness sets us on the path to change. Every change we make in our ourselves is also a change in the world.
EM: As a teacher, how important is it to keep mindfulness completely secular?
EH: If you set up a course to be secular in nature, I feel it’s important to stick to that line. When Jon Kabat-Zinn first brought mindfulness training into the US healthcare services in the late seventies, he sought the advice of zen teacher Morinaga Soko-Roshi who advised him, “Throw out Buddha, throw out Zen.”
Meanwhile, both in the UK and abroad, the reputation of mindfulness in health services has been built on scientific evidence rather than spiritual conviction.
It wouldn’t be right to go and teach a class with the idea that you were trying to convert people to anything, including secular mindfulness. A lot of people are looking for an approach that doesn’t have religious connotations. Someone who is considering exploring mindfulness might find the Buddhist context too institutionalized. They might find the secular approach easier to connect with.
EM: Do you refer to Buddhism in your classes?
EH: Very occasionally, yes, and it’s never cleared the room. It’s important to remember that mindfulness is a human quality and should be accessible to anyone. So why close the door by making it about an ism?
Having said all that I think it is important to acknowledge the debt to contemplative traditions and recognise that this teaching has been passed down over thousands of years. A lot of the most skilful mindfulness teachers have had extensive training in those traditions and, often, that’s what makes them great teachers. In my experience as a teacher, questions about Buddhism have rarely come up. Generally speaking, people aren’t there to have a philosophical discussion. They’re there because they’re looking for a way of dealing with the stresses of being alive in a way that makes sense to them.
But if you want to teach mindfulness, you need to know about the roots of the practice. When I’ve seen Jon Kabat-Zinn give talks to mindfulness teachers he talks a lot about Buddhism, Zen…He makes the point that he wouldn’t bring that into an eight-week course but it’s important for teachers to know this stuff.
EM: Having co-written The Mindful Manifesto, what was the intention behind How To Live Well?
EH: The main intention my second book was to write an introductory guide to mindfulness that was easily accessible to anyone. There’s no shortage of good mindfulness guides available. I felt it was important to include some of the things I’d learned by practicing in the Buddhist tradition before there were mindfulness courses freely available, things that are implicit within mindfulness courses but are seldom made explicit.
I wanted to include more on the attitudes we bring to mindfulness practice. I’m really struck by how often mindfulness is thought to be a neutral practice, simply about noticing what is going on. I wanted to highlight attitudes and approaches we can bring to that noticing which are helpful and healthy, and perhaps lead to more ethical ways of being in the world.
I wanted to be clear about the definitions of attention and awareness, distinguishing between the qualities in those two things. In the book I also explore the possibilities of mindful action, living with compassion and connection with the world around us. One of the criticisms that is sometimes made of mindfulness is that it cuts people off from those things and I felt that needed to be addressed.
I also wanted to bring in more of an exploration of the self. In the Buddhist tradition, the key to liberation from stress is recognizing that we are not fixed selves, that there is no solid entity called “me”, no ghost in the machine. We get caught in so many ways, whether it’s by our thoughts, our emotions or life situations. The driver of our stress is this clinging on to who we think we are. By realizing that we’re not who we think we are, we have the opportunity to become unstuck from our suffering. In the new book I wanted to bring that out explicitly.
On a mindfulness course, we learn that thoughts are not facts and that we are not our thoughts. That might be a new discovery for many people, at least in terms of having the experience of watching thoughts rather than thinking thoughts. If we’re not our thoughts, then who are we? We might answer, “I am my body.” But our bodies are changing all the time. So it’s not that we’re not here. But it could be argued that we’re more like processes than fixed entities.
Of course, the recognition that the thoughts that we have can be seen from a different perspective can be quite startling. So there’s some care required as to how this information is presented. The idea that we are a bundle of processes interacting with our environment, that can be a little frightening for some people. But, if you talk to a philosopher who is approaching this from a cognitive science perspective, they would say much the same thing. There’s probably no room to explore these possibilities within the eight-week mindfulness course but it’s quite possible that a mindfulness course will spark somebody’s interest in this kind of enquiry and there are numerous ways of continuing that exploration
EM: You say that How To Live Well is mainly aimed at beginners. But my take is that it would be equally useful for experienced meditators who are looking to refresh their practice.
EH: I guess “a beginner’s guide” was my original brief. I also had in mind a book that would be helpful for people who have read the books by Mark Williams/Danny Penman (Finding Peace In A Frantic World) and Jon Kabat-Zinn (Wherever You Go, There You Are). It’s definitely important to find new ways of connecting with our practice. Books are one way of doing that. Books can be useful starting points. But I would always encourage someone to find a group to connect with or a course to go on when possible. Working entirely from a book has its limitations. A book cannot provide that sense of group support and sense of interaction.
EM: In the second book you say that mindfulness is more like riding an elephant than a horse. How far did you go in terms of researching that theory?
EH: I didn’t get the opportunity to ride an elephant, or a horse for that matter. The analogy of the horse and the elephant is a fairly traditional one. I guess elephant-riding would be more of a challenge than horse-riding. If you’re riding a horse, you might feel that you’re very much in charge and that the horse is doing what you say. Whereas, if you are on an elephant, you will likely be more aware that the elephant is really in charge. It’s really a metaphor for the mind and the body, along with the power of our feelings which many of us so often try to either control or deny. If you take that controlling approach with an elephant, you’ll either freak him out or it’s just going to go ahead and do what it wants to do. So it’s acknowledging the power of our bodily sensations and the habitual, impulsive reactions that come up. It’s seeing the possibility that, if we can acknowledge that and work with it, accepting the wild ride of the elephant, then we can also start to influence it. Having said all that, maybe I should actually ride an elephant. If you can find one, I’ll ride it.
EM: There are two mindful exercises in the second book that appear to be freshly minted. The first is Coming To Your Senses, a fifteen minute meditation where we are invited to explore the five senses (seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching) one at a time.
EH: It’s not that the practice is unraveling anything new that we don’t already do in our mindfulness practice. The exercise involves moving from sense to sense as a way of tuning into our direct experience through the being and sensing modes that are key to knowing what’s happening right now in our experience. Also, it offers an alternative to the thinking/conceptual/analytical mode that so many of us are caught so much of the time. This meditation involves opening your eyes at some point. Meditating with your eyes open can be a valuable practice in itself.
EM: The other exercise you introduce in that book is something you call The Ten Cs of mindfulness which you list as commitment, courage, curiosity, centring, co-operation, connecting, confidence, cheerfulness, compassion and coming back. I’m particularly interested in how you see courage in relation to mindfulness.
EH: Practicing mindfulness involves a willingness to be touched by life. We so want to control our experience so that it’s pleasant. That’s habit mind. Some of us enlist mindfulness to that end. If only we can be mindful enough, difficulties won’t arise. You need the courage to ride the elephant. It’s so important to acknowledge the difficulties of living mindfully. I think they’re worthwhile difficulties to engage with because the alternative is trying to control them or ignore them.
Engaging with them does require a courage, a willingness to move towards difficulties and actually experience them. If you pretend it’s easy, then you’re setting yourself up for unnecessary hardship. If you buy into the idea that meditation is all about achieving a state of bliss, that’s another delusion. Mindfulness does involve moving towards your own experience with courage.
EM: In the new book you devote a chapter to the social dimension of mindfulness. In what way is that important to you?
EH: it goes back to my first (co-authored) book, The Mindful Manifesto. That book was meant to serve as an introduction to mindfulness for individuals, but there was also a suggestion that the approach might be useful in a larger sense, perhaps by promoting more widespread health and wellbeing. The thing is that you can’t really do this thing alone. Because we are inter-connected. Because we are influenced by others and, in turn, we influence others. In mindfulness, somewhere along the line, there has to be an opening up to the world that we are a part of, a realisation that we are part of a community. As I say in the book, as mindfulness opens us up, we learn to notice how we are affected by the world, and how we affect it.
EM: How far is the UK behind the US in terms of integrating mindfulness into health services and schools?
EH: I’m not sure the UK is that far behind now. If you look at the NHS, a lot depends on the area you live in. In some areas of the UK you’ve got virtually no chance of getting on an NHS course. The fact that Jon Kabat-ZInn gets invited to talk at Downing Street is a positive sign. According to a recent ICM survey of GPs conducted for the Mental Health Foundation report, 64% of doctors would like to receive training in mindfulness themselves. These are all positive signs.
In the UK, the Mindfulness For Schools project appears to be expanding. Certainly they’re training a lot of teachers at the moment. It makes complete sense. If you can teach something like mindfulness at an early age, it’s a life skill. It’s a lot easier to learn anything in your teenage years than learning it when you’re fifty or sixty.
EM: As a father of two, what are your views on how mindfulness can be used in parenting?
EH: One way of looking at mindfulness is that it’s a form of self-parenting. If you look at what good parenting is, it comes down to unconditional love and support. It’s about making your child feel OK at all times. If you look at week five of a mindfulness course, we begin to look at exploring difficulties by opening to them, breathing into them and saying, “It’s OK to be with this.” It’s that same quality that a good parent brings to child-rearing.
If we didn’t get that unconditional love as children, then maybe we can offer that to ourselves. Mindfulness teaches us to connect with our own sense of gentleness and love, along with an ability to look at the world with curiosity. If you’re able to learn that for yourself, then maybe it will feel natural to pass it along to your children.
EM: Would it be fair to say that mindfulness is as much about compassion for others as it is about self-compassion?
EH: Absolutely. But it starts with you. If you’re unable to offer yourself loving kindness, then how are you going to be able to offer that same thing to anyone else? We start out by understanding how our minds and bodies work. Then it stretches out further and we start looking at how minds and bodies connect with each other, how relationships work. If you start understanding what is going on with you, then maybe you’ve got more chance of understanding what’s going on with the person in front of you. Even if that means that you acknowledge that you don’t know what’s going on with the other person. As to whether I’ve become more empathic, maybe you should ask my wife.
EM: One thing that mindfulness teaches us is the difference between pain and suffering. What’s your take on that?
EH: Buddha explained this very succinctly in the Sallatha Sutta with the idea of someone being hit by two arrows. He compares the physical pain to the first arrow and the mental pain to a second arrow. The physical pain we all have to endure. However, the mental pain we create ourselves. We all have a tendency to cling to pain or try to avoid it and that results in suffering. When something happens to us, we make it worse with all our thoughts about what’s happening and our thoughts about what anyone else might think about what’s happening. It all becomes conflated into this kind of confused gloop.
It’s useful to distinguish between a situation that you can’t do much about and the suffering that’s piled up on top of that which makes it so much more unpleasant. Mindfulness teaches us to look at the situation that is already here that may be unpleasant and to realize that we don’t need to pile all our thoughts and projections on top of what’s already here, or to wish that the situation hadn’t occurred, struggling to change that which we can’t change right now in order to feel differently about it. Mindfulness can train us to notice what’s already here, taking our attention to the experience so that we can uncouple it from all the other stuff that causes the suffering. Often, if we just let things be, the situation will simply play out, without us having to do anything about it.
EM: Our lives seem to be increasingly dominated by technology. What part can mindfulness play in combating the stress that comes with that?
EH: I’ve heard Jon Kabat-Zinn say that he’s thrown people off retreats for tweeting during a meditation practice session. He made the point that they were tweeting about the fact that they were meditating with Jon Kabat-Zinn and he commented that, of course, they weren’t really meditating at all.
Technology is really about how you use it. I’d be careful about dismissing Facebook and Twitter out of hand. It is a choice. You don’t have to be tweeting while you’re having a meal with someone. You don’t have to check your phone for messages 200 times a day. You don’t have to spend your entire day having virtual interactions. Like anyone I find it easy to get distracted and find myself following online links without even being aware I’m doing so. Using things like Facebook and Twitter mindfully is definitely a challenge. I’m always reminded of the T.S. Eliot line: “distracted from distraction by distraction.” It seems like this is an age of continuous partial attention. We might call it multi-tasking. But what we’re really doing is flitting from one thing to another, back and forth.
Research has shown that the brain is plastic in a way that wasn’t formerly acknowledged and, with regular mindfulness practice, it does change and it fosters important biological shifts. But that works both ways. Our brains can also become habituated to flitting from one gadget to another, skimming the surface of experience, and so the brain changes to accommodate that as a habit. The question is: if the brain is capable of change, how do we want to train it to change?
EM: As mindfulness edges towards the mainstream, is there a danger that the practice will become diluted?
EH: I think there is a risk that the radical essence of mindfulness could be watered down, particularly when it comes to teaching it. Mindfulness is simple in essence but it’s not necessarily easy in practice. We’re working with the mind which is an incredibly complex thing. In terms of teaching, you need to have a certain depth of experience and be continuing to deepen that. You need to have looked carefully at your own mind to a certain point. If you haven’t, then you’re likely to be of limited use to other people. It’s often said that mindfulness is caught, through practice, rather than taught. If a teacher has only got a theoretical or conceptual grasp of it, then that’s all that’s going to be transmitted. Clearly there is a danger that people will look at it and think, “This looks simple,” read a couple of books about how to teach a course, and off they go. But would you want to be taught the piano by someone who had only been playing for six months?
Some teachers will be more helpful than others, just as some books will be more helpful than others. I was lucky when I started to connect with meditation practice in that the people I saw doing the teaching had what I didn’t have. They had a sense of presence, openness, gentleness and attentiveness. They really seemed to care about what they were doing. They had a devotion to mindfulness as a way of being through regular practice.
EM: Finally, how would you say that mindfulness has changed your life?
EH: In so many ways. It’s meant that I’m able to live with difficult physical sensations and catastrophising throughts in a way that would have been unimaginable ten years ago. In the past, when difficult thoughts or emotions arose, I was desperate to get rid of them. When stress comes up for me now, I’m able to ride it far more easily.
There are days when I don’t meditate. But my intention is to practice every day. It would be a mistake to think that, after all this time and all that meditation, I walk around in some kind of permanent blessed-out state. My mind still wanders. Every time it wanders I see that as an opportunity to come back. The practice never ends.
Even those who have been meditating for decades will admit that the autopilot way of thinking still kicks in. The mind will always wander. It’s not about finding perfection. It’s about finding it easier to be with what happens, with what arises.
The same feelings that used to tip me into depression still arise but I don’t use the label “depression” any longer. I don’t get stuck in that place in the way that I used to. When my mind starts racing with negative thoughts and I get those uncomfortable body sensations, like the churning in the gut, I’m now able to see that these are simply experiences arising. I don’t get so pulled in and I don’t perpetuate those thoughts and feelings nearly as much. That seems to help difficult thoughts and emotions pass through more quickly. In the past I would have those experiences and quickly conclude that I am depressed. I’d be thinking, “This is awful. I can’t bear it. How long is this going to last?” By doing that, I’m fixing it into an idea. By grasping on to it, I’m greatly reducing the possibility of it going away, rather than seeing it as a normal human experience that is happening right now.
I like the analogy of a cow in a field. If a cow is enclosed it will panic. Mindfulness is like opening up the field so that the cow has space to roam. It’s not that the cow itself has changed. But its relationship to the field has changed, so it’s able to relax.
Also, I have a greater appreciation of nature now. I realize now that my existential crisis was partly to do with the fact that I was desperate to connect with something. It was all around me but I didn’t know where to look for it. You start to realize that there’s more to the field than a lone cow. There’s beautiful trees and flowers to look at, the sun has just come up…Noticing all those things makes the world a far, far more pleasant place to be in.
Into The Heart Of Mindfulness is published by Piatkus.
www.edhalliwell.com
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Thanks so much for the interview with Ed. I learn so much from his writing!