Based in Brighton Nick has been practicing meditation regularly for twenty years. He has very extensive experience of teaching mindfulness and is an Associate Teacher for the Centre for Mindfulness at Bangor University.
Nick was interviewed by Jon Wilde at Jon’s home in Hove, December 2013.
EM: Growing up, did you have any interest in meditation?
ND: I did, yes. My mother, who was a psychotherapist, had read this book, written by a German man, Lama Anagarika Govinda, who’d travelled to Tibet and become a Tibetan Buddhist. When I was a kid the idea of ‘Enlightenment’ was talked about around the dinner table sometimes which I now realise was very unusual. But I grew up in an environment where personal growth, for want of a better expression, was openly discussed.
At fourteen, I visited the Skyros Centre in Greece when my mum went on a week-long psychotherapy event (and I was just a guest). One of the residents led a meditation group and that was my first experience of meditation.
EM: How was that first time?
ND: It was a real struggle. Or more to the point, I just felt I was sitting there with no real idea what to do! Even so, I knew instinctively that this was an area I wanted to go in. Even at that early stage I was fascinated by the notion of waking up to something, a journey or a way of being, that is so much bigger and more alive than the vision of fulfilment that modern society usually presents.
EM: Did you keep up any regular meditation practice throughout your teens?
ND: Not really. I was more interested in martial arts. After leaving university at the turn of the nineties I got a job in a laboratory, testing water. That’s when I did my first meditation course. During that course it became clear that my first major relationship was coming to an end and I had quite a profound insight into impermanence. I saw with utter clarity the truth that everything worldly that we rely on for emotional stability will end at some point. It was a devastating blow to my worldview and I lost faith in everything – utterly. I’d left University where I was the ‘golden boy’, excelling at everything (academically), and was out in the big wide world, experiencing my first major relationship break up, and with no real sense of how to cope emotionally or physically with the challenges of standing on my own two feet when life got tough. I was having panic attacks and effectively having a ‘nervous breakdown’.
Looking back now I can see that I had fallen into what I now call ‘hyper-vigilant’ ‘avoidance mode’- only seeing ‘threats and dangers’ and with no real trust in (or even awareness of) the inner resources that are available to all of us, which can hold us through periods of loss like that. Nor was I seeing, or even open to the incredible beauty and miracle of life, or to the positive side of loss: the whole cycle of regeneration and rejuvenation. I now see how mindfulness can help provide that bigger perspective but I didn’t see that then.
EM: At what point did you realise that your life was unsustainable as it was?
ND: A couple of years later I started getting seriously ill. I had severe chronic fatigue. For years I’d been very driven, very goal-oriented. I was running on empty. I’d been living to achieve for too long and I’d completely burned myself out. In 1994 I decided that I wanted to get back into meditation. At that time I was too ill to get to the Brighton Buddhist Centre. When I did get well enough to start going again I really immersed myself in that Buddhist community. But I was still struggling to meditate and still experiencing a lot of distress (not least because I was still very ill). Happily the Brighton Buddhist Centre put a strong emphasis on ‘spiritual friendship’ which really held me through those dark years – and on loving kindness and solidarity.
Nevertheless, at that time there was still a strong emphasis in that Buddhist movement on achieving profoundly concentrated states of mind (in the Buddhist tradition these are called Jhanas or Dyanas). This meant that my experience in meditation felt somewhat invalid (in both senses of the word). I was often experiencing misery and distress – with not the slightest glimmerings of blissfully concentrated states of mind. So I just felt a failure and found it hard to keep up with meditation.
Happily these days jhanas/Dyanas are seen as a bit of a red herring by many, and even the Buddha said that apart from the first ‘Jhana’ (which almost all of us have experience of without knowing that word for it) the others aren’t necessary for Insight into the truth of human existence (and therein complete freedom).
EM: Were there any big turning-points for you?
ND: THE big turning point for me was when somebody gave me a talk by Eckhart Tolle. He talked about the simplicity of just being in the now and that struck a big chord with me. In fact it will probably turn out to have been one of the most significant experiences in my life, and I felt tremendous excitement at the possibility that freedom could be found ‘right here right now’. Tolle’s teachings had a big impact on me in terms of waking up to beauty. I was in physical pain. I had doubts and worries about the future. But I started being able to be in touch with the depth of stillness that underlies those things. Confidence and trust began to arise. If distress and discomfort were happening, I started to see that there was a safety underneath that, and that freedom could be found in the midst of all that. It was like feeling centred in the middle of a storm. Even if pain was being felt, life could still be very beautiful.
EM: When did mindfulness come into the picture?
ND: In 2004 I did an Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) course. I was still very ill. I’d had a number of major relapses which involved anxiety and depression. I had a dream around that time. I was walking up the stairs of a house and I ended up in the attic where windows were open on all sides. I could see across the rooftops of Brighton and the town had never looked so amazingly beautiful. These ordinary rooftops looked so vivid. In the dream I was thinking, “Wow, this has been here all along.” I’d just never seen the beauty of it. But, little by little, I was getting a sense of that during my waking hours.
EM: Did that first mindfulness course prove to be a real eye-opener for you?
ND: It did, yes. On the face of it, the idea is very simple: to be aware of what you’re doing from moment to moment. The reality is that we find that’s not happening. One of the most significant things for me was understanding the principle that freedom can be found irrespective of how pleasant or unpleasant your experience is in any particular moment. To a large degree, my experience was unpleasant. I started to see that if I paid attention I could find a sense of wholeness in the midst of very unpleasant experience. That felt very different from what I had been learning, which was to focus in order to achieve a particular state.
EM: How did you end up becoming a mindfulness teacher?
ND: After doing the MBCT course, I supported three or four courses in a kind of assistant’s role. I realised I was needing to check myself in order not to take the lead in those sessions. It was obvious to me that I had a real passion for teaching. Until that point I’d been fairly confused about my future. I’d always assumed that I’d end up as an academic, having done an MA and a PhD in philosophy after leaving Southern Water. I imagined I’d become a university lecturer. But my health problems made that unthinkable. Two years after doing my first mindfulness course, I was enrolled on the teaching course at Bangor University. It was during that time that my long-time mentor Karunavira suggested that I do some of the teaching on a course I was ‘supporting’. Meanwhile, my health still wasn’t good. My recovery was very slow. It happened in fits and starts. But, clearly, mindfulness was helping me feel more at ease with my illness.
EM: One of the concepts that people new to mindfulness often seem to find hard to grasp is the idea that it’s not a goal-oriented practice. As a teacher, do you find that to be a common problem?
ND: It’s extremely common. People will say, “I’m finding this really difficult, my mind is all over the place.” Maybe they want to be told what to do at that moment. If a teacher gives them any kind of answer, it tends to feed into the idea that they have to improve, as though it’s like learning to play the piano or something. If mindfulness becomes yet another way for someone to judge themselves, then it’s not mindfulness.
There’s a fine line between judging and discrimination. If someone has thoughts or habit patterns that manifest in a destructive way, that person will want to distinguish between those habit patterns and those that are helpful. What Jon Kabat-Zinn is pointing to is something more fundamental than that, which is an open, receptive curiosity.
What’s needed at that point is a sense of openness to the experience they’re having.
In the moment, that’s their experience to be seen and witnessed.
EM: Most of us spend our lives reaching for pleasurable experiences and pushing unpleasant sensations away. But mindfulness teaches us to welcome it all in. Some people seem to struggle with this idea.
ND: Some people say, “I know that’s what I need to work with, but I don’t want to.” Given some of the very unpleasant things that people have to deal with, that’s completely understandable. It often comes down to how that idea is presented to them and how it’s understood. Eckhart Tolle says that the secret of life is to say “yes” to everything. When you find yourself saying “no”, you say “yes” to that. So you bring the “yes” into the “no”. You find yourself saying, “Yes, I don’t want this…yes, I’m feeling angry or upset.”
When Jon Kabat-Zinn says that mindfulness is paying attention on purpose in the present moment non-judgmentally, by “non-judgmentally”, he is talking about maximum respect for what’s happening right now even if there’s anger, upset or whatever going on. If we bring that attention to whatever is arising, we can experience freedom. When we bring attention to the present, we might begin to see all the beauty that is being missed all around us. We might also become aware of all the things we’ve been holding at arm’s length.
EM: Might that be challenging for some people at first?
ND: It might well be, yes. Some people might feel quite raw when they first engage with mindfulness. But the way the practice works is that we’re invited to meet those difficulties in a different kind of way. Potentially we can prevent a difficulty turning into a huge drama or even a full-blown crisis. On a course, people are able to do all this in a group environment and as part of a shared exploration. People aren’t completely on their own with it. If I’d had those tools and that approach available to me when I was in that life crisis in my early twenties I might have started to see how my ‘over thinking’ was unnecessarily turning simple fear and sadness into a drama of epic proportions.
EM: Which begs the question: can mindfulness properly be learned through a book?
ND: If somebody is totally ready for mindfulness, exploring it in a book can be very transformational. But I think it’s always going to be difficult for a lot of people to learn it purely from a book. The thing with mindfulness is that it’s very subtle. You might say that it’s caught rather than taught. Therefore it’s potentially rife with pitfalls and misunderstandings. Having a teacher there to explore all that with is likely to make a big difference. It means they’re able to have a dialogue with someone who has a lot of experience of it.
You could say that mindfulness is not something that is easily put into words. It requires rather a lot of subtle pointing. Books can do that to some extent but they’re unlikely to be a substitute for a good teacher. If you teach mindfulness, the aim is to exemplify the practice. Often it’s not so much what you say as how you are. It’s hard to get that from a book.
EM: It seems that practicing mindfulness is not like learning anything else.
NG: I think quite a lot of people are surprised to find that. Mindfulness is not self-help, neither is it about self-development. When we have this view that we’re broken and we need to get fixed, we’re striving to get somewhere. Mindfulness isn’t about getting anywhere. It’s about attending to where we already are, in the moment. That’s where the freedom lies.
EM: Do you remember any particular breakthrough moments with mindfulness when you found yourself thinking, “This is really working for me”?
ND: I had an experience on a meditation retreat five years ago. We’d been sitting in silent meditation for several days and my body was in a lot of pain. I found myself really wishing that I was well. It suddenly struck me that a ‘me’ that was in less paindidn’t exist. All that that there was that set of emotions and sensations that were being experienced ‘right there and then’. But I was giving all my heart and all my energy to something that was a complete fiction – and in doing that I was missing, one might say abandoning, the experience that actually was there. Somehow, in seeing that, what was there suddenly became witnessed. The heart began opening to what was actually there, what was real, rather than what I was wishing to be there. The act of opening to what was real rather than being caught up in what was fictional was far more powerful and beautiful than what I was imagining: the absence of physical pain. That was a real epiphany. It was as though the years had been stripped away and I was feeling what I felt when I was a little boy. It was really clear to me that the beauty and aliveness that I was looking for didn’t come from my experience. It came from opening to what is already here.
EM: Is this what Jon Kabat-Zinn is referring to when he talks about “wholeness”?
ND: That’s it, exactly. And wholeness includes both the light and the dark. That experience really gave me trust in the mindful approach. It made me realise that things come up in order to be seen. I realised that was one of things I needed to teach people.
EM: In terms of your teaching, do you have any golden rules?
ND: In a class of eight or nine people, they might all be there for very different reasons, so I feel it’s important not to be too rigid in my approach. For all of us it’s a journey into the unknown. I try not to give the impression that I have all the answers because that would be likely to disempower people. Yes, I have wisdom I want to share but it’s very collaborative. I feel it’s better to teach by example than by what I actually say.
As a teacher I’ll have a certain agenda for each session but there’s only so far that theory will go. Mindfulness teaching involves exemplifying presence rather than teaching ideas. If it’s only about ideas, then the magic of discovery is lost. So long as there’s presence and connection with people, then the session will flow.
EM: Having attended one of your courses and joined you on day retreats, I’ve noticed that you bring a great deal of humour to your teaching.
ND: Humour is definitely an important ingredient. As with any situation, if you focus intently and sensitively and there’s a high degree of presence, there will be a certain amount of energy that comes out as humour. I trust that a session is going well if there’s a certain amount of laughter in the room.
EM: How regular is your meditation practice these days? And how mindful would you say you are throughout the day?
ND: It’s pretty much a daily thing. On an exceptionally busy day, my meditation might get truncated to fifteen minutes. I’d like to think I’m fairly mindful throughout the day. But I wouldn’t dream of claiming to be mindful 24/7. I think that’s such an unrealistic and limiting goal because it’s expecting something super-human.
One of the Buddhist teachers who inspires me at the moment is Kenneth Folk. He argues that, if you took some of the so-called enlightened people and put them in the middle of a city, living in a caravan with a wife and three kids, it wouldn’t be long before some quite unpleasant mental states presented themselves.
In my own life there’s definitely a far greater mindfulness and ‘presence’ than there used to be. But quite a lot of the time, I do find myself rushing about, getting wound up about things. Those are old habits. I think it’s unrealistic for anyone to expect that they can practice mindfulness for a while and that all their old habits will be eradicated. The spiritual teacher Ram Dass once said that his old neuroses still came up, but they didn’t last nearly as long and he no longer took them so seriously. That sounds about right to me. Mindfulness is not about achieving perfection. It’s a working ground where freedom is available to us at any given moment. We always have the opportunity to come back to what is happening right now.
EM: When interviewed for Everyday Mindfulness, Vidyamala Burch remarked that the issue of mindfulness and Buddhism is a hot one. What are your thoughts on the subject?
ND: Jon Kabat-Zinn has always taken a secular approach to mindfulness whilst always taking care to acknowledge its Buddhist roots. My own view is that it should remain a secular practice because the fantastic thing about it is that anyone can do it, regardless of their religious persuasion. It might be worth bearing in mind that there’s Buddhism and Buddhism. The core teachings of The Buddha are very psychological in terms of looking at your experience. They’re very direct and very simple. Then Buddhism flowered into a world religion, which is how most people now think about it. If they were to look at the actual teachings of The Buddha, they probably wouldn’t think in terms of a religion at all.
Even so, if people directly associated mindfulness with Buddhism they might well be dissuaded from taking up the practice.
A friend of mine says that mindfulness is ‘Buddhism by stealth’ in the sense that there’s a great deal of Buddhist teaching in the secular courses.
EM: On the flipside of that, is there a feeling in the Buddhist community that mindfulness is somehow watering down Buddhist teachings?
ND: Some people will have that fear and that view. However, my belief is that most people will be drawn to the healing and transformational power of mindfulness without any religious direction. It would be true to say that Buddhist teachings go further and deeper than these eight-week courses. Some people will be drawn to Buddhism and some people won’t.
It could be said that the eight-week course orientates you to being alert, attentive and receptive to what is happening right now. In the Buddhist teaching there’s this extra step which is that, when you attach to things that are impermanent and insubstantial, you will suffer. Through the cessation of that, there is freedom. Now that’s kind of implicit in the eight-week course because there’s this focus in recognising that thoughts and emotions are impermanent. The course gently encourages people to look at their direct experience and that in itself will lead to a high degree of freedom. The point Buddhists would make is that complete freedom is only attained by a complete recognition that everything is impermanent. A lot of people who do a mindfulness course wouldn’t want to think about that. But it will be obvious to most of us that, if we grasp after things that are fleeting, we end up feeling frustrated and unhappy.
When this moment is met as it is without being turned into a story, there is freedom. There can also be freedom in the midst of a painful experience. If we have the trust to be with painful feelings fully enough, we can see it all as raw energy. That’s all a part of Buddhist teaching. But it’s also at the heart of MBCT.
EM: One of the biggest misconceptions about meditation is that it is self-indulgent. Wouldn’t it be fair to say that self-compassion leads quite naturally to compassion towards others?
ND: Yes, I think they’re the same thing. My sense is that compassion is a very respectful, highly receptive attentiveness to what is happening. That can be turned towards ourselves or it can be turned towards other people. The irony is that, if we look deeply enough between ourselves and others, we might start noticing a connectedness. When sadness arises in you, it’s really not that different than when it comes up in someone else. If you can meet it and respect it in yourself, it becomes a lot easier to meet it and respect it in someone else.
EM: Mindfulness seems to be enjoying boom times at the moment with a plethora of new books etc. Is there a danger that unscrupulous types will see it as an opportunity to cash in? Might people be attracted to the idea of teaching mindfulness simply because they see it as an easy option?
ND: I’m sure that will happen from time to time. Again, there’s a lot of subtlety involved in teaching mindfulness. If someone was to start teaching it for the wrong reasons, they’re likely to come unstuck fairly quickly. I got concerned about this a couple of years ago when I saw that there were so many people training to become mindfulness teachers. But my view is that, if people have an aptitude to teach, then we can’t have too many good teachers. If the practice of mindfulness is spread in the right way, that has to be good news. But it’s worth bearing in mind that maintaining a teaching practice requires a tremendous amount. You have to not only teach when the going is good, you need to work with challenging situations when they come up. It also requires a real depth of personal practice.
EM: What would you advice be to someone who was thinking of taking up mindfulness practice?
ND: Years ago I saw an interview with a spokesman for the Shaolin monks on the news. He was saying that they had come to give the world a message: it’s never too late and it’s never too early. I really believe that. The wonderful thing about mindfulness is that it’s about being awake to what is happening right now. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been doing it for twenty years or whether you’re completely new to it. Both those people can be fully open to the experience of what is happening right now.
It’s not uncommon for people to say to me, “I wish I’d discovered mindfulness twenty years ago. My life would have been completely different.” Of course, that’s just another thought, a thought that is likely to make someone feel unhappy, full of regret. Perhaps it’s enough just to notice that you’re having that thought without allowing it to run away with you.
EM: How is your health these days?
ND: It’s pretty good. I still have periods in the day when I need to lie down. But I’m working more or less full-time. I go swimming. I perform with an improvisational comedy troupe. I dance. Though I do get fatigued, I don’t say that I have chronic fatigue any more.
EM: How would you say mindfulness has changed your life?
ND: It’s enriched my life. Or it’s put me in touch with the richness of life that I was missing. It’s also given me a new ‘home’ – a home of ‘awareness’ right in the middle of any experience, and a real sense of trust in that. Whatever happens I now trust that there can be a coming home to a stillness that was already there underneath – in the midst of it. Occasionally that’s very difficult, if there’s a lot of sadness or anxiety for example. But even then there’s a trust in sitting with that rawness and a confidence that the practice can ‘hold’ anything- and that it all keeps changing.
Also there’s been a process of integration, definitely. For years there were different parts of me that were always at war. Nowadays, those bits of me are in accord. They talk to each other, if you like. When things go wrong in my life, there’s much more trust now in terms of knowing that I have the inner resources to meet those challenges as they come up.
There’s more of a sense of wonder in my life these days. One of things I sometimes do is walk down to the sea in Brighton. I’m aware of the sea but I’m also aware of the veil that’s between me and the sea when I start thinking. So there are moments when I’m really in touch with the churning, bubbling, frothy water. Then a thought comes in and I’ve lost that connection with the water. But I’m aware that the moment has become deadened. Then the awareness returns.
EM: What kind of future do you envisage for mindfulness? How mainstream do you see it going?
ND: I can see it becoming a lot more prevalent. We’re just at the beginning but the signs are very positive at the moment, with the NHS embracing it more and more, along with it being integrated into schools. It’s awe-inspiring to see those developments and I feel privileged to be a part of it. Make no mistake, the world needs mindfulness.
Useful link:
http://mindfulnessforwellbeing.co.uk