Mindfulness A practical guide finding peace in a frantic world - Mark Williams and Danny Penman

• You are not your thoughts.
• You come to profound understanding that thoughts and feelings (including negative ones) are transient.
• 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 mind is constantly trawling through memories to find those that echo our current emotional state.
• A few sad thoughts can en up triggering a cascade of unhappy memories.
• You can't stop the triggering of unhappy memories, self-critical thoughts and judgmental ways of thinking, but you can stop what happens next.
• Most of us know only the analytical side of the mind.
• But the mind is also aware.
• Meditation creates greater mental clarity.
• The act of smiling can itself make you happy.
• The evidence is clear: brooding is the problem, not the solution.
• Pure awareness transcends thinking.
• "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking out new landscapes but in having new eyes." (Marcel Proust)
• Mindful awarenesses - or mindfulness - spontaneously arises out of this Being mode when we learn to pay attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without judgement, to things as they actually are.
• How to double your life expectancy: If you are thirty years old, then with a life of around eighty, you have fifty years left. But if you are only truly conscious and aware of every moment for perhaps two out of sixteen hours a day (which is not unreasonable), your life expectancy is only six years and three months. If you could double the number of hours that you were truly alive each day then, in effect, you would be doubling your life expectancy.
• The seven characteristics of "Doing" and "Being" modes of mind:
1. Automatic pilot versus conscious choice
2. Analysing versus sensing
3. Striving versus accepting
• The Doing mode involves judging and comparing the "real" world with the world as we'd like to be in our thoughts and dreams
4. Seeing thoughts as solid and real versus treating them as mental events
• 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".
5. Avoidance versus approaching
6. Mental time travel versus remaining in the present moment
7. Depleting versus nourishing activities
• When people are emotionally upset - wether angry, anxious or depressed - a part of the brain known as the right pre-frontal cortex lights up more than the equivalent part of the brain on the left. When people are in positive mood - happy, enthusiastic and bubbling with energy - the left pre-frontal cortex lights up more than the right.
• The insula and the empathy
• The longer the person has meditated, the more highly developed is the insula.
• Scientific research using brain imaging (fMRI) has shown that the insula energized through meditation.
• Control, commitment and challenge.
• A sense of coherence: comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness.
• They found that their lives had more meaning and that challenges should be seen as opportunities rather than threats.
• By meditating on the sounds around you, you'll come to learn that "the mind is to thought what the ear is to sound."
• The habit releasers break down the habits that can trap you in negative ways of thinking.
• You won't find the time, you have to make it.
• It's tremendously liberating to realize that your thoughts are not "real" or "reality". They are simply mental events. They are not "you".
• "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." W.H. Murray

Mindfulness week one: waking up to the autopilot

• The first stage of regaining your innate mindfulness involves returning to basics. You need to relearn how to focus your awareness on one thing at a time.
• Firstly, you need a way to train the mind to focus.
• Secondly, you need to find ways of dissolving the habits that drive much of your routine behavior.
• Seeing her mind like as a lake, Hannah saw how often it had become disturbed by a passing storm.
• Hannah was discovering something profound: that none of us can control what thoughts rampage through our minds, or the "weather" they can create. But we do have some control over how we relate to it.
• We confuse the mind's thoughts with reality and we identify ourselves far too closely with our minds.

Mindfulness week two: keeping the body in mind

• The body is acutely sensitive to even the tiniest flickerings of emotion that move constantly across the mind.
• It's clear - far more so than any of us would like to admit - that the judgments we make from moment to moment can be significantly affected by the state of our bodies at the time that we make them. For some, this will make disturbing reading, but it's also heartening because it means that simply altering your relationship to your body can profoundly improve your life.
• To cultivate mindfulness truly, we need to become fully integrated with our body once more.
• The process of building a capacity for sustained mindful concentration and awareness.
• Although you can't stop the unsettling thoughts from arising in your mind, you can stop what happens next.
• The characteristics of “Doing” mode: they include judging everything, comparing the ways things are with the way you want them to be and striving to make them different to how they actually are.
• The elegant shift from Doing to Being.

Mindfulness week three: the mouse in the maze

• The spirit in which you do something is often as important as the act itself.
• Compassion - particularly for yourself - is of overwhelming importance.
• Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple and a keen meditator, learned this after a brush with cancer: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - all these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
• Your current state of mind is not a solid fact, but is instead governed by interlinked thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and impulse to act.

Mindfulness week four: moving beyond the rumor mill

• We don't see the world as it is, but as we are.
• We often give far more credence to emotionally charged stories than to logic, no matter how rational are the arguments.
• Our thoughts are like rumors in the mind. They might be true, but then again, they might not be.
• We might start to feel angry, sad, anxious, stressed or bitter, just because a thought triggered an avalanche of associations.
• The breathing space is not a break or diversion from reality, but a way of re-engaging with it.
• Approaching the next moment more mindfully may mean prioritizing your time, rather than frantically trying to do everything at once.
• Practice Interfering Thoughts (PITs): they undermine your enthusiasm for taking action.

Mindfulness week five: turning towards difficulties

• It's often far easier and more effective in the long run to live with our difficulties than to pour resources into battling and suppressing them.
• You will come to learn that everything changes: even the worst-case scenarios imagined in your darkest moments.
• Utile en cas de blessure lors des courses: Are you trying to get rid of them, or are you able to give them your full attention, breathing with them, accepting them, letting them be?
• Faire le lien entre la difficulté mentale et la sensation physique qui s'y rattache : Once the troubling thought or situation has been brought to mind, allow it to rest on the workbench of the mind, then let your attention drop into the body, and tune in to any physical sensations that the difficulty is evoking.
• It's the sensing of your body's reaction that's of importance. You are learning how to dissolve the first step in the chain that drives negative spiral.
• Leaving it on the workbench of the mind.
• I was exploring the sensations, not wanting to make them go away.
• It was a fear and not a fact.
• Cross-checking thoughts with reality is a powerful antidote to negativity in all its form.
• You should gently and seamlessly 'drop into' the body to explore any physical sensations that arise as difficulties appear in the mind.
• Your awareness should follow the usual hourglass shape.
• Nurturing a plant, or sowing some seeds, are among those very simple things in life that can have a surprisingly big benefit. It might even save your life.
• I am alive. I am well. I continue to challenge myself to be fully here for now. What about you?

Mindfulness week six: trapped in the past or living in the present?

• The difficulty in letting go of the past, the brooding about things that did or didn't happen or worrying about things that haven't yet happened.
• Fear that if we relax, we'll begin to fail.
• Research has found that if we've experienced traumatic events in the past, or if we are depressed or exhausted or locked into a brooding preoccupation about our feelings, then our memory shows a different pattern. Very often, the result is what psychologists call an "over-general memory".
• Our minds are always desperately trying to make sense of the world, and they do this in the context of baggage accumulated over many years together with the mood of the moment.
• You over-generalize, especially, if you are tired or preoccupied with your own problems.
• The Raisin meditation, the breath, the Body Scan, the Mindful Movement, the learning to relate to thoughts as you relate to sounds, the exploration of the difficult by working through the body, each of these has contributed that there is, for you, a new possibility.
• May I be free from suffering. May I be as happy and healthy as it is possible for me to be. May I have ease of being.
• Loving-kindness to all beings.
• I'm harming myself. I think that I need to be busy; this is really old pattern for me.
• How can I nourish myself?
• How can I slow down in the midst of my rushing?
• Can I stand back?
• How can I make choices?
• How can I be kind to myself?
• She saw at the moment when she was lying in her bed, she was actually in bed, not at work.
• They teach us to feel guilty for not working hard enough.
• Brain research shows that part of the brain that is activated when we are feeling genuine empathy for another is the same part that we saw being activated by mindfulness meditation: a part called the insula.
• We don't have to do anything more than just be there.
• Although in the early stages, the Befriending meditation might seem a little difficult, remember that is has already begun its work. Brain-imaging research has shown that within a few minutes of beginning the meditation, the parts of brain governing the "approach" qualities of kindness and empathy begin to fire.
• How your thoughts can trap you by shouting their bad advice, often based on memories that are over-general, so that you often only get a biased summary of events that have happened to you.
• Albert Einstein, along with countless scientists and philosophers throughout the ages, always emphasized the importance of kindness, compassion and curiosity in daily life. Although Einstein viewed such qualities as good in themselves, he also knew that they led to clearer thinking and a better, more productive way of living and working. He did not fall into the trap of being harsh on yourself and others leads to success. Einstein knew that this view arose because we all tend to mis-attribute success to the harsh, driving voices in our heads, rather than the quieter, more reasonable ones.
• Albert Einstein wrote: "A human being is a part of the whole called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is itself a part of the liberation, and a foundation for inner security."

Mindfulness week seven: when did you stop dancing?

• Those of us who continue downward furthest are likely to be those who are the most conscientious, those whose level of self-confidence is closely dependent on their performance at work, i.e. those who are often seen as the best workers, not the lazy ones.
• What pulls you down, drains away your energy, makes you feel tense and fragmented?
• When did you stop dancing?
• This was one of the most annoying part of the job: waiting for someone else to reply.
• Take a tea break every two hours.
• Eat one less takeaway each week and cook a meal instead.
• Or you might decide to finish work in a different way, turning off your computer a quarter of an hour earlier to give you time to consider what is on the agenda for tomorrow, rather than answering emails up to the last minute, then suddenly realizing you are late for whatever it is you planned to do after work. 
• If you know which activities nourish you, you can do more of them should you start to feel unhappy or unduly stressed or tired.
• When mood is low, motivation follows action, rather than the other way around. When you put the action first, motivation follows.
• Do something pleasurable.
• Do something that gives you a sense of mastery, satisfaction, achievement or control.
• Act mindfully.
• Tiny actions can fundamentally alter your relationship to the world for the better.
• Everyday life offers endless opportunities for you to stop, to focus, to remind yourself to be fully awake and present to what is happening right now.

Mindfulness week eight: your wild and precious life

• From 'Hokusai says', Roger Keyes:
• It matters that you care
• It matters that you feel.
• It matters that you notice.
• Anxiety, stress, unhappiness and exhaustion are often symptoms of a wider and deeper malaise. They are not free-floating affections, but symptoms arising from the way we relate to each other, ourselves, and to the world itself. They are signals that there is something wrong in our lives. They are signs to which we need to pay attention.
• Well, here it is: 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 this.
• But what we really need to weave is a parachute to use when life starts to become difficult or begins to fall apart.
• Week eight is the rest of your life.
• Weaving your own parachute: using mindfulness to maintain your peace in a frantic world:
• Start the day with mindfulness.
• Use breathing spaces to punctuate your day.
• Maintain your mindfulness practice.
• Befriend your feelings.
• When you feel tired, frustrated, anxious, angry or any other powerful emotion take a breathing space.
• Mindful activities.
• Increase your level of exercise.
• Remember the breath.
• What is it that is most important to me in my life that this practice could help with?
• Body Scan and Exploring Difficulty meditation.
• "Meditation" actually means "cultivation" in the original pali language.
• Practise as if your life depended on it, as in many ways, it surely does. For then you will be able to live with the life you have, and live it as if it truly mattered.