The quotes for this book need curating
We’d love for you to do it. If you’re not yet registered as a curator, you’ll first need to do so.
Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (Mark G. Williams, Danny Penman, Jon Kabat-Zinn)
- Pure awareness transcends thinking.
- Context has a huge effect on our memory.
- the act of smiling can itself make you happy. It
- The evidence is clear: brooding is the problem,not the solution.
- The evidence is clear: brooding is the problem, not the solution.
- it’s difficult to be curious and unhappy at the same time. Re-igniting
- strained time-ridden faces, distracted from distraction by distraction.
- The spirit in which you do something is often as important as the act itself.
- Mindfulness cultivates our ability to do things knowing that we’re doing them.
- Meditation is not a religion. Mindfulness is simply a method of mental training.
- Tiny actions can fundamentally alter your relationship to the world for the better.
- You’ll soon discover that although you feel time-poor, you are actually moment-rich.
- Mindfulness is about observation without criticism; being compassionate with yourself.
- If you simply accept life as it is, you will be a lot more fulfilled and increasingly worry free.
- are you driven by the daily routines that force you to live in your head rather than in your life?
- in some cultures, doctors don’t ask, When did you start to feel depressed? but, When did you stop dancing?
- To be mindful means to be back in touch with your senses, so you can see, hear, touch, smell and taste things
- We re-live past events and re-feel their pain, and we pre-live future disasters and so pre-feel their impact.
- there isn’t necessarily a connection between how much you are enjoying the practice and its longer-term benefits.
- What’s become of my life? Why do I feel so burned out? I should be happy. I used to be happy. Where did it all go?
- When mood is low, motivation follows action, rather than the other way around. When you put the action first, motivation follows.
- Our minds have a bottleneck in the so-called working memory that allows us to keep only a few simple things in them at any one time.
- We often have very little empathy for our own thoughts and feelings and frequently try to suppress them by dismissing them as weaknesses.
- We try so hard to be happy that we end up missing the most important parts of our lives and destroying the very peace that we were seeking
- In mindfulness, we start to see the world as it is, not as we expect it to be, how we want it to be, or what we fear it might become. These
- willingness or ability to show up fully in our lives and live them as if they really mattered, in the only moment we ever get, which is this one
- Mindfulness teaches us that thoughts are just thoughts; they are events in the mind. They are often valuable but they are not ‘you’ or ‘reality’.
- There is no need to compare your life (or standard of living) with either a fictitious life in the future or some rose-tinted view of the past. You
- Usually, in daily life, we are motivated to do something, then we do it. But when mood is low, we have to do something before the motivation comes.
- once you see the difference that paying full attention can make to the small things in life, you start to get an inkling of the cost of inattention.
- Meditation is a simple practice that gains its power from repetition. It’s only through this that we can become aware of the repeating patterns in our own minds.
- bosses were all vying with each other by working later and later. It was clear that exchanging emails late at night made her colleagues and bosses feel important.
- now is the future that you promised yourself last year, last month, last week. Now is the only moment you’ll ever really have. Mindfulness is about waking up to this.
- Mindful awareness—or mindfulness—spontaneously arises out of this Being mode when we learn to pay attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without judgment, to things as they actually are.
- For maybe the first time in years, you’re noticing in real time how the mind creates tension in the body. Soon you’ll notice that the body also creates tension in the mind in a self-sustaining loop.
- We get drawn into this emotional quicksand because our state of mind is intimately connected with memory. The mind is constantly trawling through memories to find those that echo our current emotional state.
- The breath breathes itself. If it was up to us to remember to breathe, we’d have forgotten long ago. So tuning into the breath can be an important antidote to the natural tendency toward believing that we have to be in control.
- Gradually, moment by moment, you may have come to realize that although you can’t stop the unsettling thoughts from arising in your mind, you can stop what happens next. You can stop the vicious circle from feeding off itself. The
- May you derive great benefit from engaging in this programme and its invitation to explore how you might be in a wiser and more fulfilling relationship to your ‘one wild and precious life.’ Jon Kabat-Zinn Boston, Massachusetts December, 2010
- Numerous psychological studies have shown that regular meditators are happier and more contented than average.1 These are not just important results in themselves but have huge medical significance as such positive emotions are linked to a longer and healthier life.
- The mind is constantly trawling through memories to find those that echo our current emotional state. For example, if you feel threatened, the mind instantly digs up memories of when you felt endangered in the past, so that you can spot similarities and find a way of escaping.
- Pure awareness transcends thinking. It allows you to step outside the chattering negative self-talk and your reactive impulses and emotions. It allows you to look at the world once again with open eyes. And when you do so, a sense of wonder and quiet contentment begins to reappear in your life.
- We are capable of directly sensing things like the sounds of birds, the scent of beautiful flowers and the sight of a loved one’s smile. And we know with the heart as well as the head. Thinking is not all there is to conscious experience. The mind is bigger and more encompassing than thought alone.
- Once again, it is important to keep in mind that there isn’t necessarily a connection between how much you are enjoying the practice and its longer-term benefits. It can take time for the mind to reconnect fully with the body as countless networks in the brain have to rewire and strengthen themselves.
- Mindful awareness – or mindfulness – spontaneously arises out of this Being mode when we learn to pay attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without judgment, to things as they actually are. In mindfulness, we start to see the world as it is, not as we expect it to be, how we want it to be, or what we fear it might become.
- People genuinely believe that if they worry enough over their unhappiness they will eventually find a solution. They just need to make one last heave – think a little more about the problem … But research shows the opposite: in fact, brooding reduces our ability to solve problems; and it’s absolutely hopeless for dealing with emotional difficulties.
- You can’t stop the triggering of unhappy memories, self-critical thoughts and judgmental ways of thinking – but you can stop what happens next. You can stop the spiral from feeding off itself and triggering the next cycle of negative thoughts. You can stop the cascade of destructive emotions that can end up making you unhappy, anxious, stressed, irritable or exhausted.
- Put yourself in the experienced hands of Mark Williams and Danny Penman, and give yourself over to their guidance and to the programme that they map out. The programme provides a coherent structure, an architecture if you will, within which you can observe your own mind and body and life unfolding, and a systematic and trustworthy approach for working with whatever arises.
- Mindfulness meditation encourages us to become more patient and compassionate with ourselves and to cultivate open-mindedness and gentle persistence. These qualities help free us from the gravitational pull of anxiety, stress and unhappiness by reminding us what science has shown: that it’s OK to stop treating sadness and other difficulties as problems that need to be solved.
- But tension, unhappiness or exhaustion aren’t ‘problems’ that can be solved. They are emotions. They reflect states of mind and body. As such, they cannot be solved – only felt. Once you’ve felt them – that is, acknowledged their existence – and let go of the tendency to explain or get rid of them, they are much more likely to vanish naturally, like the mist on a spring morning.
- When you start to feel a little sad, anxious, or irritable it’s not the mood that does the damage but how you react to it. • the effort of trying to free yourself from a bad mood or bout of unhappiness – of working out why you’re unhappy and what you can do about it – often makes things worse. It’s like being trapped in quicksand – the more you struggle to be free, the deeper you sink.
- Come to realise that thoughts come and go of their own accord; that you are not your thoughts. You can watch as they appear in your mind, seemingly from thin air, and watch again as they disappear, like a soap bubble bursting. You come to the profound understanding that thoughts and feelings (including negative ones) are transient. They come and they go, and ultimately, you have a choice about whether to act on them or not.
- Depression may be exacting a staggering toll, but its cousin—chronic anxiety—is becoming disturbingly common too, with average levels of anxiety in children and young people now at a point that would have been judged to be clinical in the 1950s.4 It’s not a great stretch of the imagination to assume that in a few decades unhappiness, depression and anxiety will have become the normal human condition, rather than happiness and contentment.
- Mindfulness meditation teaches you to recognise memories and damaging thoughts as they arise. It reminds you that they are memories. They are like propaganda, they are not real. They are not you. You can learn to observe negative thoughts as they arise, let them stay a while and then simply watch them evaporate before your eyes. And when this occurs, an extraordinary thing can happen: a profound sense of happiness and peace fills the void.
- This tendency to ignore the body can be reinforced by a sense that many of us have; that we do not like ours very much – they might not be as tall or as thin or as attractive as we’d like. Or perhaps they don’t work as well as they used to. And, for some of us, there is a whisper at the back of our minds that one day they will let us down catastrophically; there will come a time when our bodies grow old and die, whether we’re ready for it or not.
- Depression is taking a staggering toll on the modern world. Around 10 percent of the population can expect to become clinically depressed over the coming year. And things are likely to become worse. The World health Organization1 estimates that depression will impose the second-biggest health burden globally by 2020. Think about that for a moment. Depression will impose a bigger burden than heart disease, arthritis and many forms of cancer on both individuals and society in less than a decade.
- Some of these practices seem a little repetitive, it’s because they are. Meditation is a simple practice that gains its power from repetition. It’s only through this that we can become aware of the repeating patterns in our own minds. Ironically, meditative repetition frees us from endlessly repeating our past mistakes and the automatic pilot that drives self-defeating and self-attacking thoughts and actions. Through repetition, we gradually tune into the subtle differences that each moment brings.
- As we saw earlier, when a difficulty comes to mind, the brain’s habitual reaction is to treat it as a real enemy, so it tends to shut down its creative approach systems. For some difficulties, it might be necessary to shut down playfulness, but when you are remembering the past or anticipating the future, the difficulty is playing out in our heads and not for real, so this is unnecessary. In fact, it ends up locking things down and blocking creativity: we either feel trapped and the body slumps into submission or the body gears up to fight or flee.
- I think of myself as generally happy, but every so often I’m struck by a fleeting mood of unhappiness or anxiety that quickly escalates. On a really bad day, I may spend hours stuck in angst-ridden maunderings, wondering if I need to make major changes in my life. It’s usually then that I realise I’ve forgotten to eat lunch. One tuna sandwich later, the mood is gone. And yet, ‘Am I hungry?’ is never my first response to feeling bad: my brain, apparently, would prefer to distress itself with reflections on the ultimate meaninglessness of human existence than to direct my body to a nearby branch of Pret A Manger.
- Another eminent psychologist, Dr. Aaron Antonovsky, an Israeli medical sociologist, has also attempted to pin down the key psychological traits that allowed some to withstand extreme stress while others did not. He focused on Holocaust survivors and narrowed the search down to three traits that together add to having a sense of coherence: comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness. So hardy people have a belief that their situation has inherent meaning that they can commit themselves to, that they can manage their life and that their situation is understandable—that it is basically comprehensible, even if it seems chaotic and out of control.
- Many of us find numerous ways to avoid or put off altering the balance between nourishing and depleting activities in our lives; usually for very solid-sounding and altruistic reasons. Some may say, for example: I’m balancing being a mom, a career woman, a wife and a homemaker. Where do I find the time for myself? Others will point to the large projects at work or home, and say, Not now, not yet; maybe some day—when this project is finished. On the surface, this approach seems reasonable; but try to see if it is possible to take the long view. In time, if we don’t rebalance our lives, we will become less effective at everything we do. We will become joyless, sleepless and witless.
- The Chocolate meditation Choose some chocolate—either a type that you’ve never tried before or one that you have not eaten recently. It might be dark and flavorsome, organic or fair-trade or whatever you choose. The important thing is to choose a type you wouldn’t normally eat or that you consume only rarely. Here goes: Open the packet. Inhale the aroma. Let it sweep over you. Break off a piece and look at it. Really let your eyes drink in what it looks like, examining every nook and cranny. Pop it in your mouth. See if it’s possible to hold it on your tongue and let it melt, noticing any tendency to suck at it. Chocolate has over three hundred different flavors. See if you can sense some of them. If you notice your mind wandering while you do this, simply notice where it went, then gently escort it back to the present moment. After the chocolate has completely melted, swallow it very slowly and deliberately. Let it trickle down your throat. Repeat this with the next piece. How do you feel? Is it different from normal? Did the chocolate taste better than if you’d just eaten it at a normal breakneck pace?
