MINDFULNESS FOR DUMMIES PART 4

Wisdom

-Creativity -Judgement -Curiosity -Love of learning -Perspective

When the pressure gets too much for me, my shoulders tense up and I find it harder to smile, I'm less likely to chat to friends, and generally begin to take life far too seriously!

! I remember being like this the last time I had a really tough deadline to meet and had far too much work to get done in the allocated time.

Understanding your stress Stress is a natural and everyday occurrence. Whenever you have a challenge to meet, doing so triggers the physiological reaction of stress.

. Stress isn't an illness, but a state of body and mind. However, if your stress level is very high, or goes on for too long, then you can suffer from both physical and mental ill health.

Coping when the fire rises up You arrive home and your partner hasn't cooked any food. You were working late, and you begin to feel anger rising up in you. What do you do? You know that logically you're far better off talking calmly about the issue and resolving the conflict rather than spoiling the evening with an argument. Here's how:

1. Become aware of the physical sensation of anger in your body. Notice the sensations in your stomach, chest, and face. Become aware of your rapid heart and breathing rate. Observe whether your fists or jaw are clenched. Witness the tension in the rest of your body. 2. Breathe. Breathe into the physical sensations of your body. Close your eyes if you want to. You may find counting out ten breaths helpful. Imagine the breath entering your nose into your belly, and as you breathe out, imagine the breath going out of your fingers and toes, if you find this useful. 3. Continue to stay with the sensations as best you can. Bring a sense of kindness and gentleness to your feelings of anger. Look at the discomfort in the way you would look at scenery - taking your time and being with the landscape of your inner self. Try to see the anger as an opportunity to understand about the feeling, how the burning rises up in your being, and how the breath may or may not have a cooling effect on the flame within you. 4. Notice your thoughts. Thoughts like 'It's not fair' or 'I'm not having this' feed the fire of anger. Notice what effect you have by letting go of these thoughts, for your own health and wellbeing more than anything else. If you can't let go of the thoughts, which is common, just continue to watch the way thoughts and feelings feed into each other, creating and recreating the experience of anger as well as other feelings like guilt, frustration, and sadness. If you have lots of energy pumping through your body, try walking around the room and feeling the contact between your feet and the ground. Alternatively, instead of walking, you can try slow, mindful stretching, feeling the body as you extend your various muscle groups. 5. Step back. Take a step back from your internal experiences. Notice that you're the observer of your thoughts and emotions and not the thoughts and emotions themselves. Just as images are projected onto a screen, but the screen itself is unaffected, so thoughts, emotions, and sensations arise in awareness, but you, as awareness, are untouched. 6. Communicate. As soon as the main force of your anger has dissipated, you may need to communicate your feelings with the other person. Begin with 'I' statements instead of 'you' accusations. If you blame the other person for your feelings, you're more likely to make her act defensively. If you say 'I felt angry when you didn't cook dinner' rather than 'You made me angry when you didn't cook dinner,' you're taking responsibility for your feelings. As you continue to communicate, stay aware and awake to your own feelings, and let go of any aggression if you can - less aggression and more honesty are more likely to lead to a harmonious and productive conversation and result.

Creating conditions for originality You can do this meditation to kick-start your creativity. The meditation helps you to consider your challenge, allows time for incubation, and makes the space for new ideas to arise. As an example, I'm going to use this exercise to think of new ways to better serve mindfulness teachers who I've already trained and who currently get a monthly coaching call from me. Here's how:

1. Consider the challenge and state it clearly in a sentence in your mind. For example, 'I'm looking for a simple, powerful way to better serve my existing mindfulness teachers so they become happier and more effective mindfulness teachers.' 2. Sit or lie down in a comfortable posture, with a smile. Have a gentle smile on your face to remind yourself to have fun and be playful - the foundations of creativity. 3. Be mindful of whatever you like. For example, right now I'm in a park, and so am enjoying being mindful of the sounds of the birds. You can choose what you prefer - your breathing, your body sensations, your thoughts - whatever is predominant for you now. Practise for a least a few minutes. 4. After your meditation time is up, see which ideas pop into your head. As I did this exercise, an idea arose in my mind: to offer an advanced mindfulness teacher training programme online for those who've done my basic course. That would help them improve the quality of their teaching. I could also offer to train them to teach compassion-type meditations rather than just mindfulness-based approaches. Did any ideas come up for you? 5. If no ideas come to mind, do the exercise again. Remember to see whether you can enjoy the mindfulness exercise rather than making it a struggle. 6. If you still have no ideas or feel agitated, try going for a mindful stroll or have a mindful cup of tea or coffee. You may just need to give your brain a rest!

Here's the two-step mindfulness process for responding rather than reacting when you feel your stress levels rising:

1. Notice your current reactions. 2. Choose a mindful response.

Creating a new habit pattern results in new neurons firing in your brain.

And neurons that fire together, wire together. As you practise regularly, the neural pathways in your brain involved in being mindful begin to link up, thereby creating a healthy habit.

Cooling Down Your Anger

Anger can be healthy if the emotion is controlled and used sparingly. For example, if you're being treated unfairly, you may need to act angrily to ensure that you're treated justly and with respect. However, being out of control when you're angry can cause tremendous harm both to yourself and to your relationships with others. Cooling down anger isn't an easy process and requires a clear decision, effort, and support from others. Mindfulness can help, as this section shows.

Transcendence

Appreciation Gratitude Optimism Humour Spirituality

Meditation is similar. If you happen to get lucky and have a few positive experiences to start with, you'll stick with it.

But if you don't, please don't give up. You've only just begun the journey, and you have a lot more to discover. Stay with it and work through any negative experiences you encounter.

I find the question of selling happiness an interesting one because it really gets you to reflect on how much you value happiness.

But you sell your happiness very easily in the short term. You sell your happiness when you can't find a parking space, if your partner irritates you, or a demanding manager is rude to you. It's easy to forget how much your happiness is worth. Perhaps it's priceless?

Challenging assumptions about happiness The most common assumption about happiness is that pleasure equals happiness.

By maximising the number of positive feelings and minimising the number of negative ones, a happy life is created. It turns out that this is a very small part of the picture. Research shows that pleasure alone doesn't lead to any greater sense of life satisfaction. So, although nothing's wrong with staying in luxurious hotels and enjoying your favourite food, these activities just result in a fleeting feel-good effect.

Ask yourself the following question:

Considering everything, how are things these days: are you very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?

Mindful laughter

Everyone enjoys a good laugh. A good belly laugh has physical, mental, and social benefits.Physically, laughter relaxes your whole body, decreases your stress hormones, releases endorphins (your body's natural feel-good hormone), and improves heart and blood vessel function. Mentally, you'll feel less anxious and be more resilient to life's stressors. And socially, laughter brings people closer to you, and through it you can defuse conflict more easily and enhance teamwork.

Noticing the early signs of stress How do you know when you're beginning to get stressed about something? What are your early warning signs?

Does your eye start twitching, or do you begin to get a headache? Perhaps you lose patience easily, or begin worrying. By becoming more aware of your early reactions to stress, you can begin to take appropriate action before the stress spirals out of control.

Stress isn't always a bad thing: when you or someone near you faces a physical danger, stress is helpful.

For example, if you see a child running out in the street, the stress response provides you with the energy and focus you need to run and stop her. However, if you're lying in bed, worrying about your tax bill, stress isn't helpful: the result is that you don't sleep. If this stress goes on for too long, your health is likely to suffer.

Temperance

Forgiveness Self-contro Humility Caution

Exploring your ideas about happiness Some people describe themselves as extremely happy, whereas others claim to be unhappy.

Happiness seems to be at different levels from person to person and from moment to moment.

I often get new ideas when practising informal mindfulness. I can be going for a stroll through my local park, looking at the trees, or enjoying the blueness of the sky when a new idea pops into my head.

I usually carry around a small notebook in which to jot ideas down. I don't do this when I'm doing formal mindfulness meditation, however, because that would be a distraction. I don't try to get ideas or force them to come up.

Different situations make different people angry. Like all emotions, anger depends on the interpretation of the situation, rather than the situation itself.

If someone at a checkout gives you the wrong amount of change and you see this as a mistake, you probably forgive her straight away and think nothing of the oversight. However, if you think that she did this to you on purpose, you're more likely to become annoyed, frustrated or angry. So, it's your interpretation that causes the anger, not the situation itself.

If you can't cope with being still and feeling your breath for ten minutes, try five minutes.

If that's too much, try two minutes. If that's too much, try ten seconds. Begin with however long you can manage, and build it up, step by step. The most important thing is to keep at it, practise as regularly as you can, and gradually increase the time you practise for. Eventually, you'll become a super-patient person. Think of those huge bodybuilders who started off skinny but by taking small steps achieved Olympic weightlifting standards. Believe that you can develop patience, and take the next step.

Your reactions to stress are partly based on what you assimilated in childhood, are partly genetic, and partly based on your own experiences with stress.

If whoever brought you up reacted in a certain way to stress, you have a greater chance of behaving in a similar way. Your own experience of ways of dealing with stress also comes into the equation. Perhaps you've always drunk several cups of coffee when you're feeling stressed, and find the caffeine helps you to get your work done. Although you may feel that this is effective, caffeine is a stimulant, and the more you drink the more stressed you'll probably become. Changing these small habits can make a big difference.

Meditation is patience training. To commit to connect with the breath or the senses requires patience.

If you feel impatient in your meditation practice but continue to sit there, you're beginning to train the patience muscle. Observe the feeling of discomfort. See whether your impatience stays the same or changes. Just as your muscles hurt when you're training in the gym, sitting through impatience is painful, but gradually the feelings of impatience and discomfort diminish. Keep pumping that iron!

Stress researcher Richard Lazarus found that stress begins with you interpreting the situation as dangerous or difficult and rapidly deciding what resources you have to cope with the challenge.

If you interpret an event as dangerous or difficult and you feel you don't have the resources to cope, you experience a stress reaction. This is why one person loves going on a rollercoaster, whereas for another the experience is a living nightmare.

Reducing Fatigue

If you're full of energy, getting your daily tasks done is a doddle - you may come home from work brimming with energy, able to cook, clean, go out with your friends, socialise, and generally have a good time. If you're lacking in the energy department, everything becomes a drag - right from getting out of bed in the morning, to getting back into bed at the end of the day. You can find some helpful tips to reduce your fatigue in this section.

Moving from reacting to responding to stress When experiencing stress, I call the things that you do automatically, without even thinking about it, stress reactions.

If you're lucky, some of your reactions may be helpful and therefore dissipate the stress. More often than not though, reactions to stress are unhealthy and lead to further stress. A response is more mindful, includes some time for reflection, is aware rather than automatic, and tends to be more helpful.

Understanding anger Anger is a normal human emotion.

If you're mistreated, feeling angry is perfectly natural. The problem is knowing what to do with the emotion that arises if you hurt yourself or others with the anger.Anger arises when you feel something should happen but it doesn't, for example if you receive poor customer support for something you've bought, or you see how much crime has gone up in your city and feel angry because the government should be taking more action.

Learning from Negative Experiences Think back to the first time you met a dog. If your first encounter with a dog was pleasant, you're likely to think that dogs are wonderful.

If, as a child, the first thing a dog did was bite you or bark excessively, you probably think dogs are aggressive. Your early experiences have a big impact on your attitudes and ways of coping later in life. By learning to see that a negative experience is just a momentary thing rather than something that lasts forever, you can begin to move forwards.

Doing things just for your own happiness doesn't really work

Imagine cooking a meal for the whole family and then just eating it yourself and watching the rest of the family go hungry. Where's the fun in that? The food may taste good, but without sharing you miss something really important. Happiness is the same. If you practise mindfulness just for your own happiness and for no one else, the meditation has a limited effect. Expand your vision and allow your mindfulness to expand to benefit all, and you'll find it far more fulfilling. Each time before you practise, recall the positive effect mindfulness has on both yourself and those around you, ultimately making the world a better place to live in. (Refer to Chapter 6 for an exercise in metta meditation, which encourages kind feelings for yourself and others.)

I've combined mindfulness practice with laughter yoga (developed by Dr Madan Kataria) to enhance the process.

In this way, you don't have to find a reason to laugh: you can laugh any time!

Love

Intimacy Kindness Sociability

'Happiness is not something ready made.

It comes from your own actions.'

Dealing with physical discomfort In the beginning, sitting meditation will probably be uncomfortable.

Learning to cope with that discomfort is an important hurdle to jump in your meditation adventure. When the muscles in your body get used to sitting meditation, the discomfort will probably diminish.

Become more aware of the choices you make following a stressful event, and begin choosing small helpful strategies such as going for a walk.

Make use of mindfulness skills to help you make wiser choices. Remember to give yourself a nice big pat on the back when you make a positive choice, even if you'd normally think of it as too small or insignificant an event to reward yourself for. Every little helps!

Practise some mindfulness meditation on a daily basis, just to see what effect the exercise has on your energy levels.

Mindfulness isn't a short-term fix but a long-term way of meeting life in a healthy way; any improvements in energy may take some time but be long lasting, so persevere with your practice.

2. Choose a mindful response.

Now, from an awareness of the level of stress you're experiencing and how you're currently coping with that stress, you can make a wise, mindful choice as to the best way to cope. You know yourself better than anyone else does - you need to decide how best to cope with the stress. As you become aware of your own inner reactions, you make space for creative action to arise, rather than the habitual, well-worn paths you've chosen many times before. Here are some suggestions for a mindful response to your stress: • Take as many mindful breaths as you have time for. Even one nice big deep breath has positive physiological benefits, and everyone can do that. • Do a three-minute mini meditation (refer to Chapter 7) or practise a formal mindfulness meditation for a more extended period. • Go for a walk, perhaps in the park, or do some yoga, tai chi. or stretching exercises. • Avoid excessive alcohol, caffeine, drugs, and sugary or fatty foods. And if you do indulge by mistake, see whether you can forgive rather than berate yourself. You're human after all. • Talk to someone or socialise. Even sending a little text message is better than nothing. • Watch a hilarious comedy. Or just laugh for no reason. See Chapter 11 on mindful laughter. • Observe the stress rise up in your body and mind and then fall away. Consider yourself as the witness of stress - whole, complete, and free just as you are. Pretend that the stress is separate from you, which it is in some ways. • Do some vigorous but mindful exercise such as running, swimming, or cycling. • See stress positively. Think about how stress energises you, releases oxytocin (a hormone that encourages connection with others) and gets you moving. A recent major study found that if you can shift your mindset about stress, the stress goes from being destructive to healthy. Seeing stress in a positive way was even shown to increase people's life expectancy by many years!

Developing patience Whenever I'm at a party and I'm asked what I do, I explain that I'm a trainer of mindfulness meditation.

One of the comments I often get back is along the lines of, 'Oh, you must be patient. I don't have the patience for teaching anything, let alone meditation.' I don't think patience is something that you have or don't have: you can develop it. You can train your brain to become more patient. And it's a muscle worth building.

Keep your answers handy.

Practise this exercise daily for a few weeks to see what kind of answers you get. You may need to act on them, or you may not. Just by becoming aware of your responses, you naturally begin to move towards becoming happier.

Learning to relax The word 'relax' originally comes from the Latin word meaning to loosen or open again.

Relax is such a common word. 'Just relax,' people say. If only it were so simple. How do you relax during meditation? Essentially by learning to accept the tension you're currently experiencing, rather than fighting with it.

Breathing and smiling

Research has found a connection between the muscles you use to smile and your mood. You smile when you feel good - but interestingly, simply smiling makes you feel good. It works both ways.

Compassion motivats us to relieve others of suffering.

Research shows that compassion has deep evolutionary benefits. Your heart rate slows down, and you release the social bonding hormone called oxytocin and experience feelings of pleasure. Research on even short courses in cultivating compassion has found that people report long-term feelings of happiness.

Justice

Responsibility Fairness Leadership

Other ways of creating greater meaning include volunteer work or joining a religious or spiritual group.

Simply performing acts of kindness wherever you can gives life greater meaning. You don't have to make a massive worldchanging difference: cracking jokes with friends, making tea for everyone at the office or organising a group holiday all count.

Assessing your stress You may find that a stress diary is a useful way of assessing your level of stress from day to day.

Stress diaries make you more mindful of the areas in your life that cause you stress in the short term, as well as your own reaction to the stress. This knowledge makes you more aware of the onset of stress and your response to it, allowing you to make more helpful choices to lower your stress levels if they're too high, or at least to view your stress in a more useful way.

Coping with anger is a challenging task, and nobody can follow these steps perfectly.

The idea is to keep these steps in mind and follow them with small levels of frustration rather than outright anger. When you do, you become more adept at cooling the flames of anger.

I don't really have outbursts of anger.

The last time I had to act in an angry way was during a visit to India a few years ago. A shoe polisher insisted that she wanted to polish my shoes, so we agreed a price and she polished them. Then she tried to charge me ten times more. I refused. She then wouldn't give my shoes back. So I decided to act as if I was angry to get my shoes back! It worked. I had to raise my voice, and I attracted a little crowd. I then gave the shoe polisher the agreed price, which she promptly threw back at me. I was a bit disappointed with her but felt sorry for her too. She was poor, and perhaps I should have given her more money. But this is a simple example of how acting angry can help you get your shoes back!

Using your mind to manage stress Stressors don't cause stress on their own. First, you need to interpret the stress as a problem that may have a negative impact on you.

Then the stress reaction occurs. This simple but fundamental process can be seen in Figure 12-1 below. Remembering that you're the observer of your stress rather than the stress itself helps you to become free, and stress becomes less of a problem.

If you rate yourself as not too happy, don't despair!

This chapter is designed to help you work towards greater wellbeing. You can use a whole range of well-researched approaches right away.

When you interpret a situation as challenging, your body's primitive nervous system is hard-wired to automatically begin a chain of reactions in your body.

This includes stress hormones being released into the bloodstream, your pupils enlarging, perception of pain diminishing, attention becoming focused, blood moving from the skin and digestive organs into the muscles, breath and heart rate rising, blood pressure increasing, and more sugars being released into your system, providing you with an immediate source of energy. In this state of body and mind, called the fight-flight-freeze response, you see almost everything as a potential threat. You're in an attack mode and see things from a survival, short-term point of view, instead of seeing the longterm impact of your words and actions. You fight the situation, run away or simple freeze, unable to take action.

Using Mindfulness to Reduce Stress Research shows that mindfulness reduces stress, in the short and long term, even well after people have completed training in mindfulness.

This is because many people choose to continue to practise some form of mindfulness as part of their daily routine years later, because they found it so helpful. In this section I explore the various ways stress creeps up on you, and how mindfulness can help you say goodbye to unmanageable levels of stress.

Helping others mindfully Of the three ways of achieving satisfaction in life (pleasure, engagement, and meaning), engagement and meaning are by far the most effective, and of the two, meaning has been found to have the most effect.

To achieve deeper meaning, you work towards something that's greater than yourself. This involves doing something for others - or, in other words, helping others. A meaningful life is about meeting a need in the world through your unique strengths and virtues. By serving a greater need, you create a win-win situation: the people you help feel better, and you feel better for helping them.

You can test this out for yourself.

Try smiling right now and simultaneously think a negative thought. Can you? I find that smiling certainly has an effect over negative mood.

Breathing out your stress

Your breath is a particularly helpful ally in coping with stress. Many relaxation programmes are well aware of the power of the breath in regulating stress, and recommend deep breathing to manage it.

1. Notice your current reactions.

What are your body, mind, and emotions doing? Are they showing the signs of stress? Acknowledge the fact that you're suffering from stress. Observe how you're reacting to the stress. Your body may be tense in certain places. Perhaps you're suffering from indigestion or have had a cold for weeks. Your behaviour may be different to usual. You may be snapping with anger for the smallest thing. You may not be making time to meet up with friends. Your emotions may be fluctuating. You may feel tired or out of control. Your thoughts may be predominantly negative. You may have trouble concentrating. At this stage, you just need to become aware of what's happening, without judging the situation as bad or wrong - just be aware, without the judgement if you can. By becoming aware of what's happening within you, the experience is already transforming. This is because you're observing the stress, rather than being the stress. As the observer of an experience, you're no longer tangled up in the emotions themselves. You can't be what you observe.

Acting angry and being angry are different.

When you act angry, you don't experience a lack of control or a loss of reason. You can switch straight back to smiling when you need to.

Setting realistic expectations If you think that mindfulness meditation is going to make you feel calm and relaxed and free of all problems straight away, you're going to have a hard time

When you first learn to drive, you don't expect to be an expert after one lesson. Even after you pass the test, it takes years to become a good driver. Meditation, like any other learning experience, takes time too. Have realistic expectations about meditation.

Through this exercise you begin to allow your inner creative space to fill with fresh, new ideas.

You clear out the old limiting ideas to make space for the brand new ones. Feel free to interrupt the meditation at any time to write your ideas down, because this isn't a formal meditation practice but a creativity exercise - allow yourself to have fun with it and experiment.

Anger arises from a thought or series of thoughts. Anger doesn't just come up on its own.

You may not be aware of the thought causing the anger you feel, but a thought must have arisen for the emotion to surface. For example, if you think 'That cashier is out to rip me off', you feel anger surging through your body almost instantly afterwards.

Regular mindfulness meditation and doing your daily activities with a mindful awareness makes you more aware of your own thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and behaviour.

You're more likely to be aware when stress levels begin to rise, and you can then take appropriate action. Take a few moments to reflect on the last time you were stressed. Did you notice what was happening to your body? Which parts became tense? Was it your tummy or jaw? How did your behaviour change? Did you call up your drinking buddies or some other particular friend? What sorts of emotions did you feel? Anxiety or sadness? What thoughts were going through your mind? Negative thoughts about yourself or others? Look out for these changes when facing your next challenge. Then you can use mindfulness to reduce your stress to more acceptable levels.

Imagine you're sitting at home and you decide you're going to go home. What do you need to do? You guessed it:

nothing! You're already there. The journey of mindfulness is like that. You feel as if you're getting closer to true meditation, but really each moment you practise is true meditation, no matter what your experience.

You experience certain physical sensations when angry, such as tensing your

shoulders, tightening your stomach, a headache, clenching your hands or jaw, poor concentration, feeling sweaty, increasing your breathing rate, restlessness, and a fast heart rate.

Some other ways of managing your feelings of anger are to:

✓ Be mindful of the thought patterns that feed your anger. These include: • Over-generalising by using sentences like 'You always ignore me' or 'You never respect me.' Be specific instead. • Mind-reading by thinking you know what the other person is thinking, and often predicting the thoughts as negative, such as 'I know you think I nag you too much.' Try to avoid making assumptions like this. • Blaming others for your own anger with thoughts like 'You always make me angry' or 'It's all their fault.' Instead, take responsibility for your anger. ✓ Take mindful physical exercise. By exercising regularly, you build up a greater resilience to stress, and this may dissipate some of your anger. By exercising mindfully (see Chapter 7), paying attention to all the physical sensations as you perform an exercise, you simultaneously build up your mindfulness muscles too, leading to greater levels of awareness and less reactive, automatic-pilot behaviour. ✓ Connect with your senses. Listen to the sounds around you or listen mindfully to some music. Smell some of your favourite calming scents. Eat a snack as slowly as you can, chewing and tasting with as much awareness you can muster. Have a shower or bath and connect with the sensations on your skin. Look out of your window and enjoy the sky, clouds, trees, or rain. ✓ Question your reaction. Ask yourself questions like: 'Is this worth it?' 'Is this important in the big picture?' 'How else can I respond in this situation?' 'What is a more helpful thing to do now?'

Usually, in mindfulness, you simply need to be aware of your breath and don't have to change your breathing rate. However, here are some different techniques you can use to help relieve stress:

✓ Diaphragmatic or belly breathing. You can do this lying down, sitting up with your back straight, or in whatever position suits you. Take a natural breath and allow your belly to fill up with air. Allow the breath to release as you normally do. Repeat for as long as you feel necessary. Feel each breath coming in and going out of your body. (See Chapter 6 for more about diaphragmatic or belly breathing.) ✓ Counting your breaths. Adopt a comfortable posture and close your eyes if you want to. Feel your breath coming in and out. Each time you breathe out, count. Begin with one, and work your way up to ten. When you reach ten, start again from one. If at any point you lose count, begin again at one. You may find it difficult to get past the number two or three before your mind goes off into worries or dreams - no problem. All that matters is that as soon as you notice that your mind's drifted off, you start again at one, without criticising yourself if you can. ✓ Breathing and smiling. Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile. And sometimes your smile is the source of your joy. So if you feel stressed, lift up the corners of your mouth as you feel your breathing. For more on breathing and smiling, see Chapter 11. ✓ Deep mindful breathing. Take a deep breath and allow your belly to fill up with air. Hold your breath for a few seconds and then slowly release the breath. Repeat for as long as you feel comfortable. As you breathe out, allow yourself to let go of all tension and stress as best you can. If you can't, you don't need to worry - just try again later. ✓ Mindful breathing with other activities. Mindful breathing while engaging in day-to-day activities provides a calming and nourishing antidote to stress. If you're doing a simple or repetitive activity, become aware of your breathing as you do it. For example, as you walk, feel your breath and notice how your breathing rate changes. If you're waiting for your computer to start up, or you're in a queue, or hanging up the clothes on the washing line, simply allow some of your awareness to go to the feeling of your breath. As you practise, you may become great friends with your own breath. You look forward to being with the breath and noticing its calming, rhythmic flow.

Designate a notebook as your stress diary, and try the following. Write down:

✓ How stressed you feel on a scale of one to ten, with ten being extremely stressed ✓ What caused the stress ✓ The thoughts going through your mind, your emotions, and bodily sensations like headache or tense shoulders ✓ How you're responding to the stress - in other words, your actions

Here I break down the forms of stress into the following categories and offer some mindful ways to ease them:

✓ Physical stress: This is when your body is under too much pressure. You may be sitting in one position for long periods, or lifting very heavy weights or exercising your body excessively. Reduce this by simply trying to take more time off and by practising the body scan (Chapter 6) to learn to be kinder to your body. ✓ Mental stress: This arises if you have too much work to do in too short a space of time. Time pressure can cause stress. Thinking too much and worrying are sources of mental stress. Reduce this stress by practising mini meditations regularly (Chapters 7 and 8) and perhaps mindful walking (Chapter 6). ✓ Emotional stress: This is often due to relationship issues. Perhaps you've had a communication breakdown with someone or feel very depressed, anxious, or lonely. Practising compassion meditations (Chapter 6) or forgiveness meditation (Chapter 4) can really help here. ✓ Spiritual stress: Your life lacks a sense of meaning or purpose. You may feel disconnected from other people or nature. The compassion meditations (Chapter 6) and meditating in nature can help. Reading mindfulness books, spending more time with friends or getting some life coaching may help too.

Discovering energy drainers Some activities are similar to energy leeches - they suck energy out of your system. By discovering and mindfully reflecting on what takes energy out of you, you can begin to reschedule your lifestyle, or reduce your intake of energy drainers. Energy drainers include:

✓ Too much stress. If you allow yourself to become overly stressed out and don't take steps to manage the stress, you stand to burn lots of your energy. This is because the stress reaction, or fight or flight response, pushes all your energy reserves out of your digestive and immune system and into your muscles. If you keep engaging the stress reaction again and again, your energy reserves gradually become more and more depleted. Use the mindfulness tips earlier in this chapter to help combat stress. ✓ Too much thinking. If you take your thoughts too seriously, you give your mind undue attention. This tends to feed the mind and encourages you to think more and more. The brain uses a massive 20 per cent of all your energy - if you give thoughts too much attention, they spiral out of control, zapping your energy. Take a step back from thoughts, and don't let thoughts become your master. ✓ Too much sugar. Although sugar may seem to uplift your energy in the short term, your energy levels soon plummet. Reduce your intake of refined sugar and watch out for low-fat foods that contain high levels of sugar to make them taste good. Read Mindful Eating For Dummies by Laura Dawn (Wiley) to learn how to be more mindful with food. ✓ Skipping breakfast. Lots of research shows the benefits of eating a healthy breakfast. In fact, people who don't eat breakfast not only lack energy but are also more likely to put on weight due to overeating later on in the day

Reacting automatically implies a lack of choice. Through practising mindfulness, you begin to have a greater choice of ways to respond, and can thereby achieve a more satisfactory outcome. Make a list of the unhelpful and helpful ways in which you deal with stress:

✓ Unhelpful reactions may include drinking too much alcohol or caffeine, negative thinking, zoning out, working even harder, or eating too much or too little food. ✓ Helpful responses may include going for a walk, exercising, meeting up with friends, meditating, or listening to music. As you make your list, don't been too hard on yourself. Instead, laugh or at least smile at your shortcomings. Hey, no one's perfect!

Use the following tips to lower your level of stress by becoming aware of how you interpret challenges:

✓ Write down the thoughts that are causing you stress. For example, if you've just suffered a relationship breakdown, just keep writing whatever comes into your head. Nobody else but you needs to see what you write, so be totally honest. The process of writing helps to slow your mind down, and enables you to tackle the stressful thoughts one at a time. Having written them, remember that thoughts are just thoughts - not necessarily facts. Your stress is caused not so much by the thoughts, but because you believe them to be true. Seeing thoughts as just sounds and images that pop in and out of consciousness reduces their impact significantly. ✓ See the big picture. What effect does seeing things from a different angle have on the situation? How would you feel if you were in someone else's shoes? This may be the person who seems to be causing the stress, or someone else - you choose! Or, imagine you're zooming up into the sky, away from your life. See your own town, your region, your country. Keep imagining that you're zooming out of the planet to the solar system and beyond! Is your stress still such a big issue? ✓ Consider what's the worst that could happen. Sometimes you may imagine the situation to be worse than it actually is. By considering the worst, you may realise things aren't that bad. ✓ Break down the problem. If you have a big problem and can't face up to the issues, try splitting the problem into small steps. Then take things one step at a time. For example, if you've lost your job and are short of cash, the first step to getting a new job may be to rewrite your CV (résumé). You can even break that down to phoning a friend to help you write one, or getting a book from your local library on writing CVs. ✓ See problems in a different way. If you see difficulties in life as challenges, your mind may automatically begin to start searching for helpful solutions. If all you see are problems, you're more likely to feel drained and stressed by their weight on your shoulders. See challenges as opportunities to discover new things about yourself and your resilience, rather than problems to be avoided or coped with. Think of this challenge as something that's come into your life to teach you a wiser, kinder way of living. ✓ Discuss the cause of the stress with someone. The process of talking about your issue is likely to help you to see aspects you never even thought of. And even if you don't, the very act of talking about the issues you're facing helps to dissipate their potency. ✓ Let go of perfectionism. Perfectionism is a common reason for high levels of stress. Understand that being perfect is impossible to achieve. Adjust your standards by lowering them a little. You can try aiming for 80 per cent perfection and see whether that helps. Notice how the imperfection of a tree with its wonky branches and lack of symmetry is also its beauty. In the same way, see the beauty of your imperfections. This is the ancient Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi. ✓ Appreciate what's going well. Think of all the things that are going well for you at the moment and write them down. They don't need to be big things - anything you're even slightly grateful for will suffice. Doing so encourages you to feel less stress. You're still breathing? You have a roof over your head? You have a friend? Anything is fine.

Assessing your energy levels Begin by assessing your energy levels in a typical week or month. You can do this by simply making a note in your diary or journal. You'll find several benefits of doing this:

✓ You discover how your energy levels change from one day to the next. ✓ You see at what times of the day you have the most energy available to tackle your more challenging tasks. ✓ You may begin to see patterns: certain foods or certain physical activities may be boosting or draining your energy levels

Applying Mindfulness with Positive Psychology Positive psychology is the science of wellbeing -

- it's concerned with people's strengths, improving normal lives, and building healthy organisations. Mindfulness is one of the most powerful tools in the positive psychology toolkit, because evidence demonstrates a link between mindfulness practice and levels of happiness.

Courage

-Bravery -Perseverance -Integrity -Enthusiasm -

Positive psychology describes three different ways to happiness. You can use all three interchangeably

-Pleasure -Engagement or flow -Meaning

Realising that setbacks are inevitable When I first learnt to meditate, I tried too hard.

. I thought I had to get something. I sat up extremely straight in a stiff way, rather than comfortably. Each time my mind wandered away from the breath, I hauled it back instead of kindly guiding it back to the breathing. I waited for an experience. I kept trying to clear my mind completely. Sometimes it felt wonderfully blissful, and I thought I'd got it! But then it went away. So, there I was again, trying to get it. I felt I was going through setback after setback.

Decide how long you're going to practise mindfulness meditation for, and stick to it.

. Take the meditation moment by moment and see what unfolds. You spend all your life trying to get somewhere and achieve something. Meditation is a special time for you to let go of all that and just be in the moment. As well as requiring patience, meditation develops it.

In the wonderful book called Happiness, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard states that wellbeing is a deep sense of serenity that underlies and permeates all emotion states, including joy and sorrow.

. This sense of being, or well-being, is cultivated through 'mind training' (meditation). Mind training involves becoming aware of destructive emotions like jealousy and anger. Rather than acting on them, which just reinforces the self-perpetuating process, watch them arise in your awareness, without judgement. As you watch the negative feelings rise up in you and refrain from acting, or reacting, these feelings naturally subside in their own time. This doesn't mean you spend all day trying to force a grin on your face (although apparently that actually helps), but you see different emotional states as opportunities to find out about them and create an emotional balance between them. You're not pushing them away or grabbing hold of them - just calmly observing them, from moment to moment.

If a strong memory or worry of a past or present difficulty comes up in your practice of meditation, try taking the following steps:

1. Become aware of the fact that something challenging has come up for you that keeps drawing your attention. 2. Observe what effect this difficulty has on your physical body and emotions at the moment. 3. Listen to the difficulty as you would listen to a friend's problems, with a warm sense of empathy rather than criticism. 4. Say to yourself words like, 'It's alright. Whatever the difficulty is, it will pass, like everything else. Let me feel it for this moment.' 5. Accept the difficulty just as it is for the time being. 6. Breathe into it and stay with the sensations, even if they seem to grow larger at first. With practice, stay with the feeling of the difficulty for longer. 7. When you're ready, gently go back to the focus of the meditation.

Consider this scenario. You feel tense. Your shoulders are hunched up, and you can't let go. What do you do? Try the following steps if tension arises during your meditation:

1. Become aware of the tension. Get a sense of its location in your body. 2. Notice whether the tension has an associated colour, shape, size, or texture. Allow yourself to be curious about it rather than trying to get rid of the tension. 3. Feel right into the centre of the tension and breathe into it. Feel the tense part of the body as you simultaneously feel your natural breathing. Just be with the tension as it is. Say words like 'softening' in your mind to see what effect that has. 4. Notice whether you have any feeling or desire to get rid of the tension. As best you can, let go of that too and see whether you can accept the sense of tension a little bit more than you do already. 5. Send kindness to that part of your body. You can do this by gently smiling towards the sensation, or by placing your warm hand on the tension and caring for that part of your body or wishing that part of your body well. Say to yourself words like, 'May you be well, may you soften, may your tension ease.' Showing a sense of affection for this part of your body is probably the best way to ease the tightness in the long run.

Have a go at this mindful laughter exercise. You can do this exercise with a friend or even with a group of friends or family members:

1. Begin by doing a mindfulness exercise together with a smile on your face. Any mindfulness meditation from this book is fine. The breathing and smiling exercise above is a good one. 2. Now look someone in the eye and, as you clap, say, 'Ho, ho, ha, ha, ha.' Make the sounds of laughter. Be as playful with this as you can. Be non-judgemental and let go of your inhibitions if you can. Be like a child for just the next few minutes. 3. Try the handshake laugh. As you and your friend shake hands, look each other in the eye and do some fake laughs. You may find yourself finding it funny. But if not, no worries. You're just warming up. 4. Take a few moments to just calmly breathe between these laughter exercises. 5. Now sit in a circle or facing each other and laugh. Any kind of fake silly laugh will suffice. Have eyes open or closed. Listening to the laughter of others can kick off your own laughter. Laughter is contagious. Let the joy bubble up inside you. And remember: there's no need to think you're doing it incorrectly if your laugh isn't a real one at the moment. You're just starting the journey of mindful laughter. Get serious about laughter by seriously laughing! 6. Finish with another mindfulness exercise in this book. It can be simply mindfulness of breath or some relaxing mindful walking. Or lie down and try doing the body scan meditation.

To create a habit of mindfulness meditation try the following:

1. Decide on a plan of action: how long you'll meditate for every day and at what time. 2. Stick to the plan whether you feel like it or not. 3. If you forget to meditate on the odd day, don't give up. Slipping up is natural. Pick up and start again. As I keep emphasising, be kind to yourself rather than berating yourself. 4. Assess your progress after four or eight weeks, and make changes if necessary. Make a new plan, perhaps meditating for a longer duration.

The next time you face difficult emotions, whether you're meditating or not, try the following exercise:

1. Feel the emotion present in the here and now. 2. Label the emotion in your mind, and repeat it (perhaps 'fear, fear'). 3. Notice the desire to get rid of the emotion, and as far as you can, gently be with it. 4. Be mindful of where you feel the emotion in your body (most emotions create a physical sensation in the body). 5. Observe the thoughts running through the mind. 6. Breathe into the emotion, allowing your breathing to help you observe what you're feeling with warmth and friendliness. Say in your mind, 'It's okay. Let me gently be with this feeling. It will pass.' 7. Become aware of the effect of this exercise on the emotion for a few moments.

Have a go at this mindful smiling exercise, which is available as an audio track (Track 19):

1. Sit in a really nice warm and cosy place, where you feel safe and comfortable. 2. Take a few moments to stretch your arms. As you do so, gently smile. 3. Come back to a relaxed seated posture, or any other posture that feels right for you. 4. Gently close your eyes. Hold that gentle smile on your face, even if you don't actually feel happy or smiley at the moment. 5. Enjoy the feeling of each in- and out-breath. Imagine your breath has the quality of happiness within it. With each in-breath, you're breathing in smile energy 6. As you breathe in, say to yourself: 'Breathing in, I calm my body and mind.' 7. As you breathe out, say to yourself: 'Breathing out, I smile.' 8. While you continue this exercise, simply say to yourself 'breathing' on each in-breath and 'smiling' on each out-breath. 9. Persevere for a few minutes to see what happens. The process may feel fake, contrived, or uncomfortable. Or it may feel great! 10. Stop this exercise after around five to ten minutes. Notice how you feel having completed this process.

Let's say, for example, that you're trying to think of something different to do with the family this weekend. Here's one way to get the creative juices flowing

1. Write down what you want to achieve. For example, I'm looking for an exciting weekend getaway with the whole family, to cheer us all up and so that we can have fun together. 2. Let go of the problem. Allow the mind to slow down and connect with the breath for five minutes or more. 3. Write down several things you've done at weekends for fun. For example, staying over at your sister's place, going to the nearest beach, staying over at your friend's house, going to local museums, playing different sports. 4. Change your perspective. Imagine you're very rich or you don't have a family, or you live in a forest. What would you do then? For example, if you were very wealthy, you might fly to a bigger city for the weekend; if you didn't have children, you might book a romantic weekend getaway; if you lived in the forest, you might start building a tree house. 5. Now see what ideas can be used from that. For example, you can travel by train or budget airline to a relatively cheap hotel in a city you haven't been to before, you can ask your neighbours whether you can stay at their country home for the weekend, or you can find a hotel that caters for children while you spend some quality time with your partner.

If you haven't seen this illusion before, you probably see a series of random dots. Now try feeling your breath, becoming aware of the feelings and sensations in your body for a few moments, and then look again in a more relaxed way

As best you can, let go of any frustrations or desires to 'get it'. Spend a few minutes doing this. Look at the image just as it is. Has it changed? Can you see it from a different perspective? Be patient and see what unfolds. I'm going to tell you now, are you ready . . . it's a Dalmatian. If you still can't see the dog, what can you do? You can ask someone else, come back to it later, or try looking from different angles - in other words, you look for creative alternative ideas. Can you see how getting frustrated may be a natural reaction but isn't helpful?

What mindfulness asks of people (to stop running away from themselves and to transcend difficulties as they arise in awareness, moment by moment) is both very simple and very challenging.

As soon as you get a glimmer of the effect mindfulness has, your trust in the process grows and a new way of living emerges.

Smile, especially when you don't feel like it or it feels unnatural.

Even if you don't feel great, smiling has a small effect. You're planting the seeds of happiness. With time, the seeds are sure to grow.

Creating a habit of mindfulness meditation sounds so simple.

However, the difficult bit is Step 2. You listen to thoughts saying things like 'Don't bother today,' or you give in to feelings of tiredness or restlessness. This is your moment to challenge the usual way in which you behave. You can practise what you committed to, or you can follow the old habit pattern. Listen to what you decided to do in the first place, and stick to the practice as best you can. As soon as you've established the habit of mindfulness, you find yourself becoming mindful without even thinking about it - the neurons in your brain have wired together. Step by step you can change.

Meaning

Living a meaningful life involves knowing your strengths and using them in the service of something larger than yourself. We live in an individualistic society, and the word 'service' isn't often thought to be attractive. However, helping others is the core ingredient for a happy life.

Try to get a sense of the gentleness of this exercise.

Look at the emotion as you would a flower: examine the petals, smell its fragrance, and be tender with it. Think of the emotion as wanting to talk to you, and listen to it. This is the opposite of the normal way people meet emotion, by bottling it up and running away.

If this all sounds too overwhelming, take it step by step.

Make the tiniest step you can manage towards the feeling. Don't worry about how small the step is: it's the intention to move towards the difficult emotion rather than run away that counts. A very small step makes a massive difference, because it begins to change the pattern. This is the positive snowball effect of mindfulness.

Finding a Personal Path The journey of mindfulness is a personal one, although it affects every person you meet, because you interact with them in a mindful way.

Many people have walked the path before, but each journey is unique and special. In the end you learn from your own experience and do what feels right for you. If meditation doesn't feel appropriate, you probably won't do it. However, if some quiet, calm voice or feeling underneath all the chatter seems to resonate with the idea of mindfulness, you begin taking steps. You decide in each moment the next course of action that can best deal with setbacks and distractions. These choices shape your personal mindfulness journey.

Pleasure

Maximising the amount of pleasure you experience leads to feelings of happiness. Eating your favourite chocolate, going out to watch a film, or going shopping are all examples of seeking pleasure. Being grateful for the experiences you're having or have had can help to enhance the happy experience and make it more long lasting. Pleasant experiences make you feel happy temporarily, but if you keep repeating them they become unpleasant. For example, eating one bar of chocolate is delicious, but not 100 bars of chocolate!

Handling unusual experiences

Meditation isn't about getting a certain experience, but about experiencing whatever is happening right now. Blissful experiences come and go. Painful experiences come and go. You just need to keep watching without holding onto either. The practice itself does the rest. Meditation is far, far simpler than people think.

Generating Positive Emotions with Mindfulness

Mindfulness is about offering a warm, kind, friendly, accepting awareness to your moment-by-moment experience, whatever that may be. For this reason, any practice of mindfulness, in the long term, develops your ability to generate positive feeling towards your inner (thoughts, emotions) and outer (world) experience. To develop this further, try the exercises in this section

Everyone experiences difficulties of varying degrees from time to time.

Mindfulness is here to help you to be with the difficulty if you can't change the circumstances that are causing it.

Accepting your progress Mindfulness meditation is a long-term process: the more time and appropriate effort you put in, the more you get out of it.

Mindfulness isn't just a set of techniques that you do to see what you get immediately: it's a way of living. Be as patient as you can. Keep practising, little and often, and see what happens. Most of the time your mind may wander all over the place and you may feel you're not achieving anything. This isn't true: just sitting down and making a commitment to practise daily for a certain time has a tremendous effect; you just can't see its effect in the short term.

Looking at change Humans are creatures of habit.

Once you get into a habit, you effortlessly do it day after day without a second thought. So, for change to last and become effortless, it needs to become a new habit - in this case, the habit of mindfulness. When you establish a pattern of mindfulness, your brain immediately begins to change, gradually transforming your experience of life for the better.

This shows how the same thing (that picture) can be seen in two different ways.

One seems random, and the other a fairly clear image of a dog. We create our reality. If you let go and look deeply, other realities can unfold. The interesting thing is, once you've 'seen' it, you can't forget it! Sometimes you may do this with problems too: seeing the same problem instead of new and innovative approaches to a solution. Try letting go of the obvious answer: walk away, meditate, do something else, and come back to the challenge later on with a refreshed and therefore more creative and happier mind.

Exploring creativity

Play is an important aspect of creativity. If you're willing to play and have fun, creativity is sure to follow on. When you play, you engage the more creative right side of the brain. You let go of the usual rules. If you stick to the normal rules, you can't come up with something new. The new is born from transforming the way you see things.

Using your personal strengths mindfully

Positive psychologists carefully analysed a range of strengths and virtues, and found 24 of them to be universally significant across cultures. By discovering and using your strengths in your work and home life you achieve a greater sense of wellbeing because you're doing something you're good at and that you love doing.

If you really don't enjoy this approach to laughter, try to watch more comedies or spend time with people who make you laugh.

See the funny side of things, and avoid taking things too seriously, by asking, 'Is there a more light-hearted way of seeing this situation?

Fighting to let go of tension just leads to more stress and tension.

That's because trying implies effort, and if the tension doesn't disappear you can end up more frustrated and angry. A warm, gentle acceptance of the feeling is far more effective.

You may be impatient for results if you're a beginner to mindfulness. You've heard of all the benefits of meditation and so you want some.

That's fair enough. However, because meditation requires patience, when you begin to practise regularly you'll see that the more impatient you are, the fewer 'results' you get.

Emotions behave in only three ways when you become mindful of them. The emotion will either grow, stay the same or diminish.

That's it. And eventually, all emotions will pass - that's the way they work. Remembering this is a powerful meditation in itself.

People can be very unkind to themselves through self-criticism, often learnt at a young age.

The learnt behavioural pattern of self-criticism can become like an automatic reaction any time you face difficulties or you make mistakes. The question is, how do you change this harsh, critical inner voice that keeps attacking you? The mindful approach is to listen to it. To give it space to say what it wants to say, and to listen, but in a gentle, friendly way, as you may listen to a young child or a piece of beautiful music. This ends up breaking down the repetitive, aggressive tone, and ends up calming and soothing the self-criticism a little. Just a tiny shift in your attitude towards these thoughts makes all the difference in dealing with difficulties.

That money equals happiness is another popular belief.

The relationship between happiness and money is really interesting, because society gears itself towards acquiring more money and therefore hoping for more happiness. One experiment compared the happiness of big lottery winners with the happiness of people who had been in a serious accident and become paralysed. That's a serious test: what a comparison! The results showed that after two years, the people who won the lottery went back to the happiness level they'd been at before. The same happened with the paralysed accident victims. Isn't that amazing? Whether you become paralysed or win the lottery, you end up with the same level of happiness in the long term. I think that's incredible. It shows that the power of your mindset and attitude is stronger than circumstances.

An interesting way of finding out your ideas about happiness is a technique called sentence completion. Complete the following sentences quickly with five or six different answers, without thinking too much:

The things that truly make me happy are . . . To be 5 per cent more mindful in my life, I need to . . . To be 5 per cent happier in my life I need to . . .

Keep your mind engaged in the moment, and ideas naturally arise. Imagine you're trying to remember where you left your keys, and no matter how hard you try, you can't recall where they are.

Then you forget about it, and whoosh - the location shoots into your head.

Going beyond unhelpful thoughts 'I can't do meditation' or 'It's not for me' are some comments I heard when I was last at a health and wellbeing conference.

These attitudes are unhelpful, because they make you feel as if you can't meditate, no matter what. I believe everyone can learn meditation. 'I can't do meditation' actually means 'I don't like what happens when I look at my mind.'

Getting over difficult emotions Many of my clients come to mindfulness with difficult emotions.

They suffer from depression, anxiety, or are stressed at work. They're trying to cope with anger, lack of confidence, or are burnt out. Often they feel as if they've been fighting their emotions all their lives and are now just too tired to keep fighting. Mindfulness is the final resort - the answer to coping with their difficulties.

When you first move towards difficult emotions, they may grow bigger and feel more intense, because you're giving them your attention.

This is absolutely normal. Try not to get frightened and run away from these emotions. Give yourself some time, and you'll find that your emotions flux and change and aren't as fixed as you've always believed.

Understanding why you're bothering In the middle of your mindfulness meditation practice, you may start thinking, 'Why am I bothering to do this?' and 'I'm wasting my time.'

This is quite normal and part of the process of learning to meditate. Simply notice the thought, gently say to yourself 'thinking, thinking', and turn your attention back to the breath or other focus of meditation. When you practise for a while and begin to see the benefits of meditation, your trust in the process grows and your doubts diminish.

You can develop a state of flow in anything you do, if you give it your full attention.

This is where mindfulness comes in: developing a relaxed, calm, focused awareness from moment to moment. Even washing the dishes or walking the dog is an opportunity to live in this state of flow, a condition of happiness. Give full attention to whatever you're doing, whenever you remember.

Think of meditation as planting a seed. You plant the seed in the most nourishing soil you can find, you water it daily, and you allow it to grow in a sunny spot.

What happens if you poke around in the soil to see how it's doing? You disturb the progress of course. Germinating a seed takes time. But there's no other way. You just need to regularly water your seed and wait.

Releasing Your Creativity

What is creativity? Where does creativity come from? How can you become happier and more creative? Good questions! The act of creativity is a deep mystery. If creativity is a mechanical process in which you do such and such, it ceases to have its intrinsic uniqueness. For example, I'm being creative by writing this book. I simply type the words that come into my mind. I don't know where the thoughts are coming from: they seem to arise into awareness and vanish again in the same mysterious way. Creativity is a beautifully magic process that seems to be a natural part of the Universe. By using ways to calm your mind, you find the creative process naturally unfolds itself, which increases your happiness.

In meditation you may sometimes experience floating (just imaginary; I'm not talking about levitating yet!), flashing lights, flying pigs, or pretty much anything the mind can imagine.

Whatever unusual feelings arise, remember that these are just experiences and come back to the focus of the meditation. In mindfulness you don't need to judge or analyse these experiences: simply let them go, as far as you can, and then come back to the senses. If you find yourself really struggling or feeling unwell, gently come out of the meditation and try again later; take things slowly, step by step.

By cultivating compassion, you make a positive contribution to the world.

When you feel a little happier, you make the world a happier and more peaceful place to live. The planet is our home, and the best way to protect it is through compassion - positive relations with others. Ultimately, it's vital for the survival of our species.

'A smile makes you master of yourself.

When you smile, you realise the wonder of the smile

To be highly creative, you need to calm the mind completely. Many research papers show that a calm and relaxed mind is far more creative than an anxious and stressed one.

When you're calm, your thoughts aren't firing off too often, so you have space for creative ideas to rise to the surface. Creativity is a bit like looking for treasure at the bottom of a lake. If the water is choppy and murky, you can never see the treasure below. But if the lake is clear and calm, you can easily see it. Mindfulness gives space for the mind to become calm, and at the same time raises your level of awareness. You're not forcing calmness, you're just creating the right conditions for it to happen

Imagine that you're able to sell your happiness. Once you've sold it, you'll never be happy again - your happiness will be gone.

Will you sell your happiness, and for how much? Maybe £1,000? Most people say no. How about £50,000? That gets people thinking, but usually the answer is no. How about a million pounds in cash - crisp £50 notes - in exchange for your happiness? Think about that for a moment. A million pounds. Will you sell it? A million pounds can buy you a lot of stuff, but you'll get no happiness in return. How about a billion pounds?

Engagement or flow

With flow, you give 100 per cent of your attention to and are at one with whatever you're doing, whether pleasurable or not. Flow usually requires some effort on your part. The activity involved is just challenging enough to hold your relaxed attention. Refer to Chapter 5 for a complete description of flow

Thoughts of failure have an effect only if you approach meditation with the wrong attitude.

With the right attitude, there's no failure, only feedback. By feedback, I mean that if you think your meditation didn't work for some reason, you now know what doesn't work and can adjust your approach next time. Think of when you were a child learning to talk. Imagine how difficult that must have been! You'd never spoken in your life and yet you learnt how to talk at only a few years old. As a young child you didn't know what failure meant, so you kept trying. Most of the time what came out was 'ga-ga' and 'goo-goo', but that was okay. Step by step, before you knew it, you were speaking fluently.

In fact, I was going through a learning process, beginning to understand what meditation was all about.

You can only have a setback if you're trying to get something or go somewhere. If you have no goal, you can't really have a setback. Ultimately, meditation is about letting go of goals and being in the here and now.

You can always lie down for mindfulness practices.

You don't have to sit up if it's too uncomfortable for you. There's no rules here. Do what feels right for you.

Mindfulness practice is like training in the gym.

You may feel uncomfortable at first, but through regular practice you get better at being mindful in each moment. Because it's such a gradual process, you may not notice any change at first, but just trust in the process and give it a decent try. Keep going to the brain gym!

There's no such thing as a good or bad meditation.

You sit down to practise meditation - or you don't. It doesn't matter how many thoughts you have or how bad you feel in the meditation. What matters is trying to meditate and making a little effort to cultivate the right attitude.

Approaching difficulties with kindness When you face a difficulty in life, how do you meet it? How you relate to your difficulty plays a big role in the outcome.

Your difficulties offer you a chance to put mindfulness into practice and see these difficulties in a different way. How do you meet problems? You can turn towards them or away from them. Mindfulness is about turning towards them with a sense of kindness rather than avoidance.

Smiling's contagious:

have you noticed how infectious a smile is? If you see someone smiling, you can't help but do the same. It also reduces stress: by deliberately becoming aware of your breathing and smiling, you act against the body's automatic defence mechanism and allow a more restful and calm state to occur.

Meditation can lead to very deep relaxation. However, relaxation is not the aim of meditation:

meditation is ultimately an aimless activity.

Be patient about your progress.

s. You can't see a plant growing if you watch it, even though it's actually growing all the time. Every time you practise meditation you're growing more mindful, although it may seem very difficult to see from day to day. Trust in the process and enjoy watering your seed of mindfulness.

Don't worry:

you don't necessarily have to change your job or lifestyle to lead a meaningful life. You just need to make a genuine attitude shift. If you're a lawyer who wants to make as much money as possible, that severely limits your overall sense of happiness. The same work can offer more meaning, with the right motivation. Justice, equality, the inner desire to help others - all give you a much greater sense of meaning and purpose in such a career

Some common thoughts with useful antidotes to remember are:

✓ 'I can't stop my thoughts.' Mindfulness meditation isn't about stopping your thoughts. It's about becoming aware of them from a detached perspective. ✓ 'I can't sit still.' How long can you sit still for? A minute? Ten seconds? Take small steps and gradually build up your practice. Alternatively, try the moving meditations detailed in Chapter 6. ✓ 'I don't have the patience.' Meditation is perfect for you! Patience is something you can build up, step by step, too. Start with short meditations and increase them to increase your patience. ✓ 'It's not for me.' How do you know that if you haven't tried meditating? Even if you've tried it once or twice, is that enough? Commit to practising for several weeks or a few months before deciding whether mindfulness meditation is suitable for you. ✓ 'This isn't helping me.' This is a common thought in meditation. If you think this, just make a mental note and gently guide your attention back to your breathing. ✓ 'This is a waste of time.' How do you know that for sure? Thousands of scientific studies and millions of practitioners are unlikely to be wrong. Mindfulness meditation is beneficial if you stick to it.

Here are ten realistic expectations to reflect on:

✓ 'My mind will wander around. This is what happens in meditation, even if it's for a few breaths.' ✓ 'There's no such thing as a good or bad meditation. It's like when a small child does a scribble for drawing. It just is what it is.' ✓ 'Mindfulness isn't about getting certain experiences. It's about being with whatever arises, moment to moment, with acceptance.' ✓ 'I'll sometimes feel calm and sometimes feel agitated and tense in meditation. With time, the calmness will increase.' ✓ 'Meditation is a long-term practice. I'll gradually learn to let go of my expectations as I practise.' ✓ 'It may be difficult to motivate myself to practise every day, especially at the beginning. Some days I may forget to practise. That doesn't mean I should immediately give up.' ✓ 'Sometimes I may feel worse after the meditation than before. This is part of the learning process that I need to understand.' ✓ 'I can never know how I've benefited from meditation. I can only practise every day and see what happens.' ✓ 'Even after years of meditation, I may sometimes feel I haven't progressed. This isn't a fact but an idea. Meditation works below conscious awareness, and so I can't know what's happening there.' ✓ 'The more I practise, the easier it gets.'

To increase your day-to-day feelings of happiness, try this:

✓ Discover your signature strengths. You can discover your own strengths for free at www.authentichappiness.org. ✓ Use your signature strengths in your daily life wherever you can and with a mindful awareness. ✓ Enjoy the process and let go of the outcome.

Whether happiness is the key purpose of life or not, happiness has scientifically proven benefits:

✓ Happiness improves your relationships. You have more friends and get on better with them. ✓ Happiness boosts your intelligence. No matter how smart you are, you use those brain cells well. ✓ Happiness makes you more optimistic. You see the bright side in most situations. And your optimism makes you feel happier too. ✓ Happiness makes you live longer and more healthily. You have lower blood pressure and fight off diseases more effectively. ✓ Happiness supercharges your creativity. You're capable of coming up with new and innovative ideas for home and work.

Savouring the moment Savouring the moment means becoming aware of the pleasure in the present time by deliberately focusing attention on it. Here are some ways of developing this skill:

✓ Mindfulness. Being aware of what you're doing in the moment is the only way of ultimately savouring the moment. If your mind and heart are in two different places, you miss the joy of the moment - the breeze that passes through the trees or the flower on the side of the pavement. Most of the exercises in this book help you to grow your inner muscle of mindfulness. ✓ Sharing with others. Expressing your pleasure to those around you turns out to be a powerful way of savouring the moment. If you notice a sunset or beautiful sky, share your pleasure with others. Letting someone know about the pleasure it gave you helps to raise the positive feeling for both of you. However, don't forget to look carefully at the beautiful thing first - sometimes it's easy to get carried away talking and miss the beauty of the moment itself. ✓ Seeking new experiences. Vary your pleasurable experiences rather than repeating the same ones over and over again - it's a happier experience. And if you like ice cream, eat it once in a while and with full mindful awareness rather than feeling guilty about it.

To reduce physical discomfort when meditating, you can try several things:

✓ Sitting on a cushion on the floor: • Experiment with using cushions of different sizes. • Slowly and mindfully stand up, stretch with awareness, and sit back down. ✓ Sitting on a chair: • Try raising the back two legs of the chair using books or wooden blocks, and see whether that helps. • You may be sitting at an angle. Gently lean forwards and backwards and to the left and right to find the middle point. • Ask a friend to look at your posture to check that you look straight. • Ensure that you're sitting with a sense of dignity and uprightness, but not straining too much.

Here are the Dalai Lama's suggestions to develop greater compassion and therefore happiness in your life

✓ Understand what true compassion is. Compassion isn't desire or attachment. When you're genuinely compassionate for your partner, you wish for him to be happy. The ultimate form of compassion for your partner means that even if he behaves negatively or leaves you, you're happy for him if he's happy. That's not easy! Just start by imagining yourself in his shoes when he goes through a tough time, and wish for his difficulties to end soon. ✓ Realise that, like you, everyone wants to be happy and not suffer. Once you begin to see how we're all the same underneath our thin layer of skin, you feel greater compassion for others. Compassion grows when you see how everyone's essentially the same, with the same desires and the same essential needs. ✓ Let go of anger and hatred. You can do this by investigating your feelings of anger and hatred for others. Do they serve you? Do they make you feel happier? Even when you think that your anger gives you the energy to act on injustices, look more closely: anger shuts down your rational brain and can make your actions destructive and unkind. Investigate and observe mindfully for yourself. Notice the difference between acting as if you're angry and actually being angry. The former is less destructive. ✓ See compassion as strong, not weak. Compassion and patience are mistakenly thought of as weak. Actually they offer great strength. People who react quickly with anger are not in control of themselves. Whereas someone who listens, is patient and compassionate is tremendously resilience and strong. The science agrees on this too. ✓ Be grateful for your enemies. If you want to learn tolerance and patience - qualities of compassion - you can't learn from your friends. You need a challenge. So when someone annoying comes into your life, be thankful for the opportunity to cultivate compassion! Understand that this person has a deep desire for happiness, just like you do. He may be looking for happiness in the wrong way. Wish that he finds a better path to happiness and therefore doesn't suffer so much. If he suffers more, he may just cause more pain for others. ✓ Treat whoever you meet as an old friend, or as a brother or sister. That makes you feel happier straight away! ✓ See beyond people's outer appearances. They may look different, dress differently, or act differently. But remember that underneath we're all the same. We're all part of the same human community.

Here are a few of the key principles:

✓ You don't need a reason to laugh. You don't need to have jokes, comedy routines, or anything like that. You can if you'd like, but it's not necessary - simply having a playful attitude and creating sounds of laughter is sufficient. ✓ Fake it until you make it. The idea is to do fake laughs. If they turn into real laughs, great. If not, that's fine too! With practice, you'll get better at it. It'll feel very strange at first, but just persevere and you'll find yourself laughing for real at the silliness of the whole thing! ✓ Be conscious and enjoy the experience, however it goes. Most people aren't used to laughing much. And many people don't laugh at all. So it'll take time at the beginning. With experience, you'll be laughing more easily. It's just a matter of getting used to it. Because the neurons in your brain that fire together, wire together, with practice you'll be able to enjoy and laugh more easily at life's ups and downs.