I started practicing mindfulness in 2011 and up until I first plonked my derriere on a cushion, I had never given any thought to meditation. My GP had suggested I try mindfulness as a way of managing stress and anxiety but to say I was sceptical would be quite the understatement!

I was a “hardline sceptic”, someone who considered meditation as nebulous and esoteric at best (I’ll spare you the other judgements that ran through my mind when thinking of the subject). I was convinced it couldn’t possibly help me, but I had been suffering with stress and anxiety for so long that I thought “what have I got to lose?” And so off I went with a sceptical skip in my step to an 8-week course and despite my reticence, I stuck with it.

This decision to complete that 8-week course is up there with the best decisions I have made in my life.

Although it would be wrong to say that initial 8 weeks completely changed my life, it did sow the seeds of behaviours and practices that would change my life for the (much!) better.  Within those 8 weeks I noticed changes that I wanted to develop.  I was happier, I was responding to stress triggers differently and I was much kinder to myself in the face of my inner critic. I knew I had to continue so I signed up for the MSc Studies in Mindfulness and this time the course really did change my life.

Those three years were profoundly impactful.  I developed my practice and built friendships in a community that shared this wonderful practice, that offered kindness and support.   I felt more connected to my direct experience, had less stress and rumination and I was more content, happy even.  Because of this I made the decision to abandon a safe career in the NHS and to teach mindfulness to others.

I wanted to offer other people what my mindful teachers had given me, to share with them the simple yet profound capacity of this practice to change your life. It soon went beyond reducing my stress and anxiety and opened up a whole new way of experiencing life. I meet the richness of life and appreciate the good and ride out the difficult and painful in a way that I would never been able to if I’d not sat down on that cushion, close my eyes and breathed.

Each time I now sit, I remember that first step (scepticism and all!) as part of my ongoing journey.  Why not connect with your motivation again and simply be?

Anxiety might arise in relation to a worry or concern about something happening in our life. Maybe an upcoming house move or a job interview.

It might also arise because we have a strong habit of anxiety, which we have cultivated over many years, so that we become concerned when we don’t have something to be anxious about. Worry thoughts just pop into the mind randomly, we engage them and get caught up in catastrophising thinking loops which feed our anxiety.

We might also experience existential anxiety when our meditation practice is about to generate a significant insight. Such insights can change the way we think about ourselves, what we think we are and how we think the mind works. Or they can change the way we think about the world, what it is and its true nature. We might think, if my perspective changes, who would I be? How would I live in the world? What would the consequences for my life be? I wouldn’t be who I think I am!

I remember once being on retreat when I had an insight about how mean I had been to someone. This contradicted my idea of myself as a kind person and so was very threatening. I remember being very upset and overwhelmed. Not because I had been mean to this person, but because my image of who I thought I was had been challenged. This insight threatened my sense of self.

Transformative insights are very valuable in enabling us to see and come to terms with deeply ingrained habits. They are the basis of deep personal growth which over time reduces our levels of day to day suffering (and that of those around us) and increases our overall happiness. If we can unconditionally accept these old habitual patterns they tend to transform themselves by a process which Krishnamurti called ‘The seeing is the doing’. When we see clearly and in a felt sense way how our habitual patterns cause harm, then they tend to transform themselves. But after such transformation, who would I be?

So, this kind of existential anxiety can be a significant block to our progress of meditation practice. So how do we proceed?

First, we familiarise ourselves with the components that make up anxiety, the thoughts we buy into, how anxiety feels, and any emotions that accompany the anxiety. Then we can hold these components in a wider space and see them for what they really are,  habitual happenings within the mind and learn that we don’t have to buy into them and make them real.

Second, we cultivate courage. There is no courage without fear. The deeper the fear the stronger the courage. Compassionate imagery can help us here to cultivate an ally that has absolute courage and strength to support us in facing anxiety when it arises.

If this is something you are interested in exploring, then why not try our Managing Anxiety Course starting in September. You can find more information here.

that’s what it’s like
when, after grasping
and spinning and reaching
and clenching at last,
exhausted with my own fear,

I lay my hand on my own heart.
and see through my thoughts,
and practice loving
what is beneath my palm:
This frightened woman

and the life that lives through her.
Not a single promise I will be safe,
but, when I press my open hand
into the beat of my anxious heart
what was dry becomes loamy,

what was cracked becomes rich,
and a faint sweetness
tendrils through me, like incense.
soothing as a lullaby
that opens in the dark.

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Have you ever experienced ‘a faint sweetness that tendrils through you, like incense’? Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer has given us beautiful and, for me anyway, accurate words and images to describe the experience of self-compassion in this poem. Reading it I feel wonder and gratitude for the transformer of the heart. If we learn how, we can give ourselves the soothing of a lullaby in the dark, feel our nervous system shift with the touch of our hand and watch our inner experience metamorphose from ‘cracked’ to ‘loamy’ in real time.
Does this sound a little miraculous? I would say it could perhaps be described as a very humble miracle. I like how Rosemerry uses the word faint. This leads me to consider how a moment of self-compassion will not fix everything, it won’t change a grey, fractious day into a sunny joyful one, but it will sometimes give me an almost intangible sense of easing from the inside out, of receiving ‘the scent of rain after a month of drought’, so that my breath is a touch more free, my eyes a tiny bit more clear and my heart a little more steady and soft.
As I wrote the above I realised that today is close to a grey and fractious day for me. I just stopped and took two minutes to tend to my clenched heart and tense shoulders. As often happens, as I let go of the fight with reality, a sweet sigh spontaneously arrives washing through it all. Maybe it’s all ok. Maybe this will pass. Maybe there is still love, even here. Even if faint.

PS If you’d like to practice self-compassion together with others, consider our Mindfulness Level 2 – Responding with Compassion which has a strong focus on self-compassion in the first and second module before widening out into compassion for others…

Photo by petr sidorov on Unsplash

my insignificance thrills me
and the largest of my sadnesses
dwindle smaller than the space

between grains of sand
and in that moment,
knowing my place,

comes a love so enormous
I can love anyone, anyone,
even myself.

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I love and completely recognise the experience Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer describes here – how the perspective between the greatness of nature and the smallness of me can be both healing and freeing.

But I think there is something to watch out for when making that shift away from my habitual focus on Me and My trouble to what Mary Oliver pointed to when she said ‘Meanwhile, the world goes on‘. There can be a sense of disconnecting or abandoning ourselves in that shift, a kind of detaching to make the difficult stuff more manageable. A very human impulse of course, and actually an attempt at compassion (alleviating suffering) in itself, but if there’s a disconnecting involved, it’s a move away from wholeness and healing and so it will at best be a temporary assuaging.

So instead, can there be a reconnecting with the truth of that greater perspective, that lovingly includes our own stuff? It’s not about denying of our humanness or ‘the largest of my sadnesses’, but seeing what else is true? And there’s a subtle but important difference in the two…

Of course it may not always be easy to access a ‘lake or a sea or a mountainside’ when you need one. Luckily, our imagination can be a powerful ally and we may access that greatness through the porthole of our memory. And the sky is a powerful greatness in itself, even if we can only see a small piece of it in between big buildings…

Let’s practice accessing that love so enormous that we can love anyone, even ourselves!

PS one of the contexts for practising a change of perspective and loving anyone, even ourselves, is in the standalone weekend of Compassionate Imagery For Resilience…

Photo by Khatam Tadayon on Unsplash