How Mindfulness Changed My Life

By Barbara Buck

‘Waking up is ultimately something that each one of us can only do for ourselves’
Jon Kabat-Zinn

I think there is a problem with my enthusiasm for mindfulness and wanting others to benefit from it too. I struggle with keeping quiet, so I am pleased to have this opportunity to write about my own journey to this website. But Kabat-Zinn always says that it is important to not talk about your practice too much with other people; it’s your practice. ‘Don’t bother wasting your energy by telling everyone how amazing meditation is and how much it has helped you in your everyday life. Never proselytise and tell others that they should meditate, too.’ It’s great advice but hard to put into practice when something has changed your life so profoundly!

I was always anxious, a worrier, with a quick mind that raced from worry to worry, always one step ahead of myself, planning what I was going to say whilst the other person was talking; planning the future, from where I might park the car, to how I was going to manage my death; and worrying about the past, why I’d said or done such stupid things. I assumed everyone did this, that their minds were bursting with stuff they were thinking, stuff they wanted to say, all the time. But my mind would overload with it all, and I’d have panic attacks that went on for hours, with upset churning stomach, sickness and diarrhoea or terrible migraine-like headaches. I got diagnosed with depression, general anxiety disorder, and irritable bowel syndrome. I had medications for all of them, nothing really worked. I found paid work hard, too stressful, and could only manage part-time; each morning a torment of waking up anxious and being physically ill before I dragged myself in. I was ill though our holidays too, and travel terrified me. The possibilities of things to worry about were so huge in a strange place.

And then, out of the blue, when I was 53, I collapsed at home. I had a perforated bowel from undiagnosed diverticulitis which caused a severe sepsis, which basically kills you. My family were told I wouldn’t make it. I was in Intensive care for 8 days and in hospital for 5 weeks. I had four surgeries in two years, and a long slow recovery, starting in bed, to a wheelchair, to a stick, to walking unaided, over about 5 years. One of the unintended consequences was that I had a sort of peace. I was at home 24/7, couldn’t go anywhere or do anything, lots of time to think. In some ways it was much less anxious although I had begun to develop the symptoms of PTSD (a common result of being in ICU with hallucinations and flashbacks) and got referred for ‘therapy’. I’d done loads of it already in my life; psychotherapy, CBT, counselling, and had trained as a counsellor too, so I knew all the jargon already, and could easily offer you a potted version of my own mental health problems and their causes. My new therapist was supposed to offer me individual CBT, and at the first few sessions I told him my in-depth analysis of my problems. And how I understood it all in my mind but my body kept letting me down. And then he said that I seemed to have a good understanding of myself, well thought out, and had it helped me at all in the last forty years?  no it hadn’t. And he was currently training in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and how would I feel about giving that a go. He led me through a 10 minute meditation, I let my thoughts come and go, and cried, and my body let go, and you could feel the change in the room.  He sent me off to read The Mindful Way Through Depression (which is the basic MBSR 8 week course with a CD) and we worked though it over the next 8 sessions, by which time I could already see that things were different. I had laughed ‘Oh yeah, like that’s gonna happen’ when he said my thoughts would get less. And then they did.

I needed the reassurance of a teacher, and I found the Headspace website which Andy Puddicombe had set up to facilitate people ’taking ten’ minutes in a secular approach to mindfulness and meditation. I read his book and started on Take 10 and then Take 15 and 20. At the end I repeated them all. Then Headspace produced a full year of meditation which I have followed too, and I continue to use as my basic everyday meditation, on my PC every morning. I can, and do, meditate alone (and the Headspace journey leads you to that place) but I find it easier myself to commit to a daily practice though a meditation time that is begun and ended by guidance from someone else. Not as lonely, I suppose!

And the effect?  Stopped needing the Valium, started being able to do things I hadn’t in years; travel, engage with new things, let go of having to control everything (this went down very well with my kids!); became more flexible and spontaneous and creative. People noticed, and asked me what changed. And that’s how I think we tell people about mindfulness: through ourselves, our practice made manifest in how we are.

I think each one of us has our own time when we’re ready to hear about it. I would have dismissed it as New Age hippy or religious stuff before. Recently an article recommended a book called ‘Women Who Think Too Much’ and I went on to Amazon to look at it. And Amazon said, “You purchased this item on 28 May 2004”. There it is on my bookshelf, and I read it then too. But I wasn’t ready to ‘hear’ what it was telling me.

I’m really pleased to have found the Everyday Mindfulness website, and the opportunity to discuss with people in a similar place to me all the little doubts and uncertainties, and helpful tips, about practice, and be part of the Mindfulness community in the world.

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