Lucy Ranger - Mindfulness

Fundamentally we all experience stress, anxiety, low moods and pain (be this emotional or physical) at points in our lives but we are not very equipped at managing them effectively and even though our stressors are generally caused by things we think, the indicators of stress show up in the body.

We will all experience pain, sadness, stress at some point or other and to differing degrees, but it is how we manage our relationship towards them that makes a difference. For example if I get up in the night and trip over something that I have asked my partner many times to move, the pain of the trip might hurt. A bashed toe for example. But the story I add to that, the “I knew this would happen, this is typical of him, he’s so selfish” etc etc. means that long after the pain has gone, the story I have told has added to that tenfold. Perhaps I’m still annoyed in the morning. Maybe it prevented me from going back to sleep.

Mindfulness enables us to notice when our mind has wandered. To become aware of the times when our thoughts turn to things that are unhelpful and when we relive past events or time-travel forward to worrying about things that haven’t yet happened. And our brains cannot tell the difference between that which is real and things we imagine. So every time we project a thought of a future occurrence we put our bodies through the stress of the event as if it were real! And it may never even happen.

So what does mindfulness do then?

When we practice mindfulness we place the attention on something simple, like the breath. We follow it in and out. We don’t think about it or analyse it, we drop into the sensations of the breath coming in and out. What it feels like, without trying to change anything at all. Letting it be.

And inevitably the mind will wander off, thinking about the shopping, or what we did last Thursday or perhaps what we are doing later, and our job is to just notice when it wanders away from the sensations of the breath. And once we notice, we kindly es**rt the awareness back to the breath. (Without frustration or judgement)

We may have to do this a hundred times in 5 minutes. But this practice is exercising the brain in the same way we may do physical exercise. Each time we bring the awareness back to the sensations of what is happening in this moment we are exercising our “mindfulness muscle”.

And as we develop our practice we become skilled at noticing when our mind wanders in our daily lives and we build in space to make a choice as to whether we want to go down the same old pathways of worry or reactions to stress. We build some space in between the knee jerk reaction and can choose whether to continue with the thought (because obviously some thoughts are productive) or whether to return ourselves back to the present moment.

There is evidence through MRI scanning of grey matter increasing in parts of the brain responsible for regulating emotions, and decreasing in areas such as the amygdala (which is responsible for stress reactivity). And much as we learn to relate to our emotions differently, we can learn to relate differently to all aspects of our experience including pain. We change our usual reaction of bracing and pushing away the difficult to one of inviting, exploring and being with pain in a kindly curious way, noticing the pain as a bundle of sensations rather than getting caught up in the worry and thoughts and emotional reactions to the pain.

Once we have awareness of what is happening as it is happening, we can have a choice not to add the extra layers of stress to the issue. The pain isn’t going to stop but we can stop adding “this is typical” “why me” “It’s all my fault” type comments to the experience we have.

Please get in touch to find out more or to book a course.

Lucy Woods, Presence of Mind