Quote attributed to Victor Frankl
MUNI Mindful Minds
Week Five – Turning Toward Difficulties
Reflection on the Past Week
In the past week, you have become more aware of how our thoughts, imaginations, and therefore our suffering and expectations are fleeting and illusory. They arise and disappear just like sounds, sensations, and everything in nature around us. Sounds have different intensities, frequencies, they can be pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral... but they all share the same nature, which is transience.
The metaphor describing our thoughts as sounds is very instructive. It refers not only to their transience but also to their connection with emotions. Just as sounds trigger memories, imaginations, fantasies, and emotions, the same happens with our thoughts. You may have noticed how thoughts and their chains can literally carry you away to an unpleasant bodily sensation and unexpected emotion. For example, a song you love may lead you to memories and evoke sadness over the fact that you will never experience what you remember when you first heard that song.
"Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
By understanding the transience of sounds, thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations as constantly changing and fleeting, you strengthen the position of the observer. An observer who, from a "certain distance," observes how their mind works. The purpose is not to stop feeling sadness, fear, joy, or to have no thoughts and foolishly wait for an empty mind.
"Surely you have already understood that with mindfulness, these feelings will not disappear from your life. However, what can change is your relationship with them."
After the training from the past weeks, you may not react as reflexively, but choose more consciously.
- Perhaps you don't rush as often or you become much more aware of rushing.
- You deepen your understanding that we constantly evaluate the world and that our mind is reactive.
- Perhaps, thanks to the 3-Step Breathing Space, a figurative space is opening up for you, where you don't react to every stimulus immediately and automatically.
- Perhaps you can wait, maybe you don't rush as much, maybe you can endure certain discomfort without having to do anything.
- Maybe you don't dwell on a pleasant experience that has just ended with regret but accept with a sense of inevitability that this is how life is.
- Maybe you find the day longer and some ordinary things more interesting. It is also possible that you don't feel any change, and that's okay too.
Enjoy week five consciously 💛
Week Five – Turning Toward Difficulties
In the fifth week, you will learn the practice of Exploring Difficulties, which will help you face life's challenges and avoid frequently exhausting strategies to avoid them. Some problems resolve themselves over time, but others require facing them with openness, kind interest, and compassion. If you cannot acknowledge life's difficulties and spend most of your time trying to avoid or pretend they don't exist, they may gradually take away the joy from your life. Meditation allows you to gently "touch" unsettling situations and examine how your body reacts to them. When faced with difficulties, our minds tend to either suppress the unpleasant or desperately try to analyze and solve them. It is important to recognize that the mind does its best to help us and appreciate its efforts to protect us. However, the reality remains that working with the mind when facing difficulties is very challenging. As we have already discovered, it easily pulls us into the vicious circle of reactivity. However, if we direct our attention to our bodies and imagine a space between us and the dissatisfaction we are currently experiencing, it prevents us from automatically reacting to thoughts and creating more suffering and pain. Remember the story of the two arrows from last week.
"The first arrow is primary stress, pain, dissatisfaction... simply what we encounter in daily life and have no control over. The second arrow is the one we shoot ourselves in the form of unhealthy and unhelpful reactions... the one we can control."
To explore what troubles us, we will use our bodies rather than the analytical mind. We are working with the same experiences but processing them differently than we are accustomed to. We direct our attention to bodily sensations and allow the deepest and wisest part of our mind-body to work. This approach has two additional benefits.
- Firstly, bodily reactions to unpleasant stimuli often provide a clearer and more coherent signal that we can better focus our attention on.
- Secondly, bodily sensations tend to constantly change, which can lead to a profound understanding that states of mind also arise and pass from moment to moment.
Adapted and modified from "Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World" (Williams & Penman, 2011: 160-182)
1. Exploring Difficulties
Instructions
As an invitation, during this meditation, bring to mind a difficulty that is currently present in your life. Choose something small, as often there is no need to look far; everyone has something small that bothers them in life. It doesn't have to be something important or significant, but rather something that is slightly uncomfortable or unresolved for you. It could be a misunderstanding, an argument, a situation where you felt anger, regret, or guilt about something that happened, or concerns about something that might happen in the future. If nothing comes to mind, you can recall an unpleasant situation from the past.
You can also practice this approach anytime when painful thoughts or emotions visit you during any meditation or throughout the day. Please follow the recording until you become familiar with the process and read the basic steps of "how to be with difficulties" below.
How to be with difficulties: basic steps
- The first step is always to stabilize the mind and support it by directing your attention to an anchor in your body that you are already practicing awareness of. Remember that the anchor may change according to our mental and physical state. Sometimes the breath can stabilize us, other times the feet or another part of the body. During seated meditation, the most common anchor is the breath or the overall body sensation, but it can be useful to explore other anchors such as the feet or the sensations of contact with what you are sitting on – some people find them more stabilizing. Anchor your attention with kindness as best as you can.
- The next step is to pay attention to how your body reacts to the difficulty – notice any bodily sensations of tightness, heaviness, pushing away, or resistance. It may be perceived as tension, discomfort, or intensely unpleasant sensations, such as in the abdomen, chest, throat, or anywhere else. Sometimes meeting difficulties is experienced as a more general sense of trembling throughout the body.
- When you discover where and how the difficulty manifests in your body, see if it is possible to allow things to be as they are amidst it all. It may help to say something like, "It's okay. It's okay to allow myself to feel this..." or "It's here, so I'll allow it to be here, even though I don't like it."
- When you feel sufficiently stabilized and anchored, you may want to further explore the areas of the body where the sensations are most intense. You can choose to investigate these sensations by breathing with them, as we practiced in the body scan meditation. You may want to experiment with a gentle and open approach during the exhale. And if it helps, you can silently say words like "softening" and "opening" in your mind.
- If at any point you find yourself overwhelmed or caught up in a whirlwind of thoughts, redirect your attention back to the anchor to stabilize and support yourself. It's like driving a car – instead of pressing the gas, you press the brake.
- In the midst of these moments when we experience something challenging, it usually helps to approach ourselves with kindness and compassion. You may wish, as a gesture of self-care, to place your palm on your chest or heart area.
- If you find that shifting your attention to the challenging physical sensations is not helpful, you can choose an alternative method. While being aware of your sensations, keep most of your attention on the anchor. This may feel more acceptable, as we may feel stronger and more comfortable in the anchor, allowing us to be and breathe with the experience.
Adapted and modified from "Mindfulness for Life" (Bernard, Cullen & Kuyken, 2020: 54).
Notes
Rumination or constant dwelling on the past or worrying about the future is one of the most common reasons for our life dissatisfaction (at a clinical level, rumination leads to the development of depression and anxiety disorders). During the practice, notice how quick our tendency is to try to solve and analyze difficulties or try to fix them in some way.
The intention of the exercise is not to solve the problems or not have them, but rather to accept the fact that they are here and will always be.
Discover that when we simply observe them and offer them kind acceptance, just like sounds and sensations in the body, they lose their power over us in the form of reactive thinking and eventually actions. Acceptance is not a miraculous tool that will rid us of dissatisfaction and suffering, but rather a way of being through which we see the illusory nature of much of our suffering.
Paradoxically, we perceive our inner suffering as an object that activates our threat and stress response in the form of releasing stress hormones like cortisol. However, when we accept our suffering with a friendly and kind attitude, there is no need to fear it, and we eliminate the defensive stress response of our body. Of course, there are difficulties that need to be addressed immediately in terms of present danger. However, it is not necessary to react in the same way when we reminisce about past difficulties or anticipate those that have yet to come.
The point is not to get rid of the desire to solve problems and alleviate suffering, but rather to notice how automatically we start thinking about the difficulties. It is different, of course, when we consciously decide that we need to consider the next steps in our life. Then, our thinking is in line with our intention, which we clearly and consciously determine.
2. 3-Step Breathing Space when facing difficulty
Before you continue reading, did you have a chance to do the 3-Step Breathing Space today? If not, how about doing one right now before we move on? 🙂
In the past week, you practiced the breathing space exercise two to three times a day and whenever you felt the need for a moment to yourself. This week we would like to suggest that you use it whenever you experience distress in your body or mind. It is the same exercise, with the difference that when we are emotionally tense and things are complicated, it helps to name things for ourselves. This allows us to gain more distance from the situation and a bit of perspective.
Instructions
Step 1 – Becoming aware + labeling
- We have already practiced recognizing what is happening in our inner experience by noticing present bodily sensations, moods, feelings, and thoughts. Now it may help you to identify and describe what you find: "There is tension in my shoulders. There are self-critical thoughts. This is anxiety... it feels like this."
- We have already practiced deliberately focusing and redirecting attention to the breath or another anchor, such as the sensation of the feet touching the ground. Breathing with these bodily sensations for at least five breaths can be very calming. Now it may help you to say a few words to yourself to stabilize your attention:
- words like "inhale, exhale"
- or counting breaths: "inhale 1, exhale 1, inhale 2, exhale 2..." and so on
Step 3 – Expanding + allowing / hand on heart
- We have already practiced allowing attention to expand to encompass the sensations of the whole body. And maybe we have had a sense that this spacious awareness can hold our entire experience. Now it may help you to practice allowing the experience to be just as it is, whatever it may be.
- Saying a few words to yourself, such as "allowing..., allowing..., letting things be, breathing with..., breathing with..." may help.
- You may want to try placing a hand on your heart as a gesture of self-care and self-compassion.
As best you can, carry this sense of spacious awareness into the moments of your day.
Adapted from "Mindfulness for Life" (Bernard, Cullen & Kuyken, 2020: 57).
Home practice for Week Five
Main practices
- Breath and Body (8 min) followed by Exploring Difficulty (10 min) – everyday
New habits in everyday life
- 3-Step Breathing Space (3 min) – 2-3 times a day at regular times and also when encountering difficulties.
- 10 Fingers of Gratitude – everyday
- 50:50 Awareness – everyday
Please do not distribute or reproduce this work without the permission of the authors.
This program was created with the kind permission of Professor Mark Williams and the Oxford Mindfulness Center, who allowed us to use their materials as sources. It is a unique integration of the original program by the mentioned authors and our clinical and theoretical knowledge and skills.
Bernard, P., Cullen, C., & Kuyken, W. (2020). Mindfulness for Life: A Handbook for the Course. Oxford: Oxford Mindfulness Center.
Williams, J.M.G., & Penman, D. (2011). Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World. London: Piatkus.
Světlák, M., Linhartová, P., Knejzlíková, T., Knejzlík, J., Kóša, B., Horníčková, V., ... Šumec, R. (2021). Being mindful at university: A pilot evaluation of the feasibility of an online mindfulness-based mental health support program for students. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.581086.