Get Some Headspace: 10 minutes can make all the difference (26 page)

I asked John how he reacted to his eldest daughter when she got angry. He said that in those situations, when she was really upset, all he wanted to do was put his arms around her. He said that if she let him he would just hold her. He knew from experience that there was nothing he could say that would make her feel better, it was just a case of being there to reassure her. I asked him to take a moment to think how it might feel if he approached his own anger in this way, to just allow it to be, without judgment or criticism. It was at this point that John started to cry. Although it was evidently uncomfortable and even embarrassing for him, it was quite uncontrollable. He said he hadn’t realised how hard he was on himself, how he constantly beat himself up about the way he was feeling.

So John and I made a deal that his course of meditation wasn’t going to be about getting rid of the anger, but instead meeting the anger with kindness and understanding. His task was to notice every time he got angry with himself, and in that moment of realising, rather than getting angry at himself for having got angry, to allow that feeling to have a bit of space. And if he felt himself spinning out of control, to remind himself how he would respond to that anger if it were his daughter’s. John agreed to this, and he even started to sit and meditate twice a day while he was out of work. He said that he found the exercise challenging, and would often get caught up in the anger again, but said that when he remembered to remember, the feeling was as if everything suddenly became a bit softer.

We worked through a number of different techniques over the months, each specific to John’s character, but that simple yet challenging task of meeting anger with kindness remained at the heart of them all. I’m happy to say that John is still very much together with his wife and he now has a job too. It’s not that a miracle has occurred and that he never gets angry these days, but he says that life feels more comfortable now, and if he does get angry, he has a greater sense of perspective about it and is better able to deal with it.

Amy is a single mum with a young daughter. She came to the clinic after speaking to her GP about various health concerns. She was underweight, had stopped menstruating, and was experiencing a small amount of hair loss. She was a determined woman, but seemed to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders. She’d struggled bringing up her daughter on her own and, although she was keen to be in a relationship, she didn’t think anyone would really be interested in a single mum. Amy was intensely conscious of her body. She exercised at least once a day, ate a diet that was woefully inadequate, both in content and nutrition, and clearly had an unhealthy relationship with how she viewed herself.

I noticed Amy had sore-looking hands. I thought it might be eczema, but when I asked her she said that when she got stressed she had a tendency to wash her hands a lot and they got quite raw with the scrubbing. I asked her how often she did this. She said she would do it every time she touched something in public. She said that she knew it wasn’t great, but that she only did it when she got stressed. She said the bigger problem was why her hair was falling out and why her periods had stopped so suddenly. So having agreed that she would also visit her GP, we agreed to meet once a week at the clinic.

In many ways, Amy’s tendency to be very disciplined was useful when starting to meditate and she rarely missed a session. But sitting down to do it is one thing, applying the mind in the right way is quite another and Amy was heavily critical of herself and found it difficult to sit and observe her thoughts without passing judgment. She said most of the thoughts seemed to be about the exercise itself, almost as though there was a running commentary on how it was going. Amy had slipped into a pattern of thinking about thinking, which doesn’t make for a very restful mind. She also seemed to be ‘correcting’ herself the whole time, trying to create the perfect state of mind she imagined meditation to be.

If you’ve never tried meditation before it may sound strange that people would still approach it in this way, despite being told that it’s counterproductive. But habitual patterns of mind can be very strong and sometimes even though we’re told to do things a different way, we just can’t help ourselves. That’s the interesting thing with meditation. It’s a reflection of the way in which you relate to the world around you. So Amy’s experience of meditation simply mirrored her attitude to life. Despite this approach, she still made some important insights into why she was living the way she was. She became more aware of her lack of self-worth and her tendency to compare herself physically to the young girls she taught at school, despite the fact that she was over ten years older. She also became more aware of the strong thought patterns that encouraged her to act in a way that was often obsessive in nature. We worked mostly with techniques that encouraged a sense of kindness and compassion towards herself. These techniques have the same essential elements of Take10 at their core, but are further developed to best suit the personality and character traits of the individual.

Amy has now been meditating for over three years. The insights that she had early on have continued to develop and she has made some remarkable changes to the way she feels about herself. She is still underweight, but no longer dangerously so. She still exercises every day, but says it’s now more for enjoyment than punishment and her periods have started again. Amy says that while she recognises obvious changes such as living a more healthy lifestyle and having a more balanced outlook on life, it’s actually the way she feels about herself that has changed the most. She says she feels as though she’s found something within herself that reminds her that she’s OK, no matter how she might feel on the outside – so that even when she slips back into old ways of thinking, she somehow feels OK with that.

Tom came to the clinic describing himself as ‘a professional addict’. Over the past fifteen years he had been addicted to alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, sex, gambling and food. Sometimes it was just the one addiction, and at other times it was several at once. He’d been in and out of rehab a few times, and when he came to the clinic he belonged to so many different support groups that he had just one night free each week to simply relax or meet up with what he called his ‘non-addict’ friends.

Now it’s important to say that if you feel as though you or others are at risk as a result of your addictive behaviour you should always consult a doctor before following an approach such as mindfulness. Tom had seen his doctor on a number of occasions, but he felt as though he’d tried everything and yet was still falling back into the same old patterns of addictive behaviour.

Tom was single and had no children, although he said he desperately wanted a family. This was complicated by the fact that he’d come to the conclusion he was probably gay. He’d been involved in various relationships over the years, but none had lasted – more often than not because of his insatiable appetite for something new. Tom was always chasing something, and as long as he was involved in doing something, he felt OK. But as soon as he stopped, he felt on edge. He had built up an array of distractions that he could dive into. There were those that were socially acceptable, such as eating and drinking, and then there were those that he hid.

Tom had been through so much therapy over the years that he had come to think he knew it all, and was no longer so receptive to new ideas. His feelings sounded as if they had been analysed, pulled apart and put back together in the form of a psychiatric evaluation. It’s not just with therapy that this can happen. It can happen with meditation and mindfulness too, where the ideas are simply applied at an intellectual level, but don’t actually become part of one’s being. That said, it’s much harder to do with meditation, because in the silence of sitting, there really is nowhere to hide. Some of the treatment he’d had was invaluable and the support groups continued to be a great source of comfort and security to him, but he felt let down by others.

This was a good opportunity for me to remind Tom that I couldn’t promise him results, but I could tell him about the research being done into mindfulness and addiction, and I could speak from experience and tell him what other people had got out of the exercises. I explained that the success of the process would depend on his willingness to follow the programme, his discipline to do it each day, and a commitment to keeping an open mind. Tom agreed and left the clinic feeling very optimistic, having been led through the ten-minute exercise that was to be his homework for the week. To his surprise, he’d found it easier than he expected, which in turn gave him a huge amount of encouragement. Meditation can seem an alien concept for people who’ve not done it before, so it’s understandable if they worry it’s going to be impossible to do. But once you’ve actually tried it, and seen for yourself that you can do it, it’s not such a big deal, it’s just sitting down and taking ten minutes out to unwind, to appreciate the silence. Even if your mind is all over the place at first, being able to sit there for ten minutes gives you a belief and inner confidence that you can do it every time.

For Tom, this approach was very different to anything he’d tried in the past. He’d been used to having therapy every week for years, and he said that the ‘work’ was usually done during that session each week. Sometimes he would be given things to think about during the week, but mostly it was about turning up and talking through issues from childhood. He said he felt the responsibility for ‘sorting him out’ was very much with the therapist. With this in mind, I pointed out that I was not a therapist, and that the responsibility would be with him this time. This idea seemed to scare Tom a little, the implications being that if he was responsible, then he would also be to blame if it didn’t go well. No matter how much I explained that there was no
blame
in meditation, he didn’t seem convinced.

While it would be inappropriate to say that Tom became addicted to meditation, he went at it with an enthusiasm and discipline that I’ve rarely seen before. Had the dependency on a substance simply been replaced by a dependency on the feeling he experienced in meditation? Possibly, although it appeared to be much more than that. And besides, if he was going to be dependent on something in life, it’s hard to imagine anything more beneficial than meditation. To tackle the issue of dependency, we also discussed the possibility of him coming every other week, rather than every week, and then just once a month. These were big steps for Tom. It meant him taking responsibility for the health of his own body and mind, rather than blaming someone else if it didn’t go well. He still gets in touch if he hits a tricky spot or needs some guidance, but mostly he’s content to sit with whatever it is and see how it plays out, in both his mind and his life. He still attends some of the support groups, but says he feels as though he can now be there to help support others, rather than going there just to be supported himself.

1
Did you make time to do Take10 today?

If you didn’t manage it today, rather than give yourself a hard time about it, simply remind yourself how important it is to get some headspace and schedule it in your diary for tomorrow.

2
How did you feel immediately
before
Take10?

Did you feel comfortable with that feeling?

3
How did you feel immediately
after
Take10?

Did you feel comfortable with that feeling?

4
What was your mood today and how did it change throughout the day?

5
Were you aware of the little things as you went through the day?

Did you notice the warmth of the water in the shower this morning?

6
Did you notice anything today that you’ve never noticed before? If so, what?

 

1
Did you make time to do Take10 today?

If you didn’t manage it today, rather than give yourself a hard time about it, simply remind yourself how important it is to get some headspace and schedule it in your diary for tomorrow.

2
How did you feel immediately
before
Take10?

Did you feel comfortable with that feeling?

3
How did you feel immediately
after
Take10?

Did you feel comfortable with that feeling?

4
What was your mood today and how did it change throughout the day?

5
Were you aware of the little things as you went through the day?

Did you notice the taste and texture of your breakfast this morning?

6
Did you notice anything today that you’ve never noticed before? If so, what?

 

1
Did you make time to do Take10 today?

If you didn’t manage it today, rather than give yourself a hard time about it, simply remind yourself how important it is to get some headspace and schedule it in your diary for tomorrow.

2
How did you feel immediately
before
Take10?

Did you feel comfortable with that feeling?

3
How did you feel immediately
after
Take10?

Did you feel comfortable with that feeling?

4
What was your mood today and how did it change throughout the day?

5
Were you aware of the little things as you went through the day?

Did you notice the smell of toothpaste as you brushed your teeth?

6
Did you notice anything today that you’ve never noticed before? If so, what?