‘The tragedy for too many of us is not that our lives are too short but that we take so long before we start to live them.’ -Williams et al., 2007

Jon Kabat-Zinn, who developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (Kabat-Zinn, 1990) often quotes James Joyce, who famously wrote about Mr. Duffy.... who “lived a short distance from his body”. This seems to be true of most of us!

We live and breathe in these bodies. One day this body will die and the ‘I’, as we know it, will cease. And yet what Jon Kabat-Zinn is pointing towards is the fact that we are so rarely present in this body. There are so few times each day that the mind and the body come together. The body might be here, but the mind is generally off somewhere else. Most of us live most of the time in our heads— thinking. We rush from place to place—from task to task. We are so busy and as a result, we miss so much of our lives.

In this article, I will suggest some ways of coming back to the body—of recapturing more of the moments in our lives. This needs a certain commitment to practice—but we find, quite soon, that there is some tangible benefit. With a kindly and curious intention, this ‘simple’ business of coming back to the body has a steadying and balancing effect. The mind seems to calm down—and we start to slow down, and are able to appreciate things a bit more.

We will explore this ‘coming back’, with some simple short exercises. Mindfulness practice is relevant to everyone, whether dealing with the general ups and downs of normal living, or facing particular challenging circumstances. With this in mind, we will read about people facing serious illness who found practices that helped them.

We will then look at the way the body offers us clues to upcoming ‘edges’, if we are sufficiently aware. By noticing and exploring physical sensations, as they arise, we can find different ways of relating to the mind. We find that the body can function a bit like a barometer for us, pointing to upcoming emotional ‘weather’. This offers an opportunity to respond to what is arising, rather than move into our usual knee-jerk reactions.

This article is written for you as individuals first and therapists second. I see it as vital for us to practice what we teach. Any other way will not work. We need to learn to practice awareness for ourselves—before we can be skillful in guiding others to practice this for themselves. This article is written in the service of inviting you, the reader, to try out these approaches, hoping that they will be of use to you. Later, you may decide to share them with those with whom you work.

Learning To Live Again

As well as offering us more choice with what we find difficult in our lives, the practice of being mindful offers us ways of learning to appreciate, feel more alive and be more present to our world. We may well find we are more creative when we slow down to life. We discover the capacity to be openand compassionate. In essence, we may learn to love our lives again—to find joy and contentment in the simple things.

Susan, 35, and single parent of two young children, always appeared cheerful. Even when diagnosed with incurable cancer, she moved into treatment with extraordinary courage and energy. At the end, she was told that it had been so successful that she had a good chance of cure. Almost immediately, she felt herself going to pieces. She became irritable, angry, distressed and terribly anxious.

Over the 8 weeks of her mindfulness course, she learnt about the benefit of coming back to her body. She found ways of relating to sensations of fear and panic with kindness instead of judgment. At the end of the course, she was still experiencing anxiety, but she now had tools that helped her relate to it differently. She found this changed things considerably. At the last class, she described climbing to the top of a mountain with her children, feeling such pleasure that they had made it together. It was a lovely metaphor for what they had been through.

Coming Back To The Body

It seems that we only give attention to the body when we get ill or hurt ourselves—and even then, our attention is glancing, intermittent, invariably accompanied by judging thoughts and anxious pre-occupation. Our focus is more directed at getting rid of the pain or illness than experiencing it.

‘...Although turning your attention towards your pain may seem scary, people on our courses often say that it’s a tremendous relief. For those of us with chronic conditions, changing our relationship with them is often the very best medicine’ - Burch, 2008

However, most of us are a long way from being with our bodies as they are. We seem fixated on changing them for the better. We want to keep looking young, so we buy creams and potions to slow down ageing. We go on endless diets. We even consider cosmetic surgery—all in the interests of improving the appearance of the body. How might it be to practice being present with the body just as it is, in this moment? What might that offer?

Interestingly, there is ongoing research looking into the effects of mindfulness on cellular ageing and much else. Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy has been shown to halve the risk of relapse in those who have had three of more episodes of depression (Segal et al., 2002). Evidence shows mindfulness as benefitting a wide range of people with all sorts of physical and mental health conditions. Most significantly of all, it has something to offer those of us who simply want to be happier and more skillful in our lives.

So in order to develop this art of being present now, let us start with something straightforward. Inviting you to bring your attention to knowing that you are sitting here. The body has to be involved in this ‘knowing’. We are not so much thinking about sitting, but bringing direct sensate awareness to the actual physical ‘experiencing’ of sitting.

There is a lovely old story of two meditation teachers talking together. One is much older than the other. The younger one turns to the older teacher to ask ‘How is it that your students do so much better than mine? What do you teach them?’ The older one replies that he teaches his students to practice sitting, and standing and walking. ‘But that is exactly what I teach my students’, retorts the younger teacher. ‘Ah’, says the wise old teacher, ‘but when my students stand, they know they are standing—and when they sit, they know they are sitting—and when they walk, they know they are walking’.

So there we have it. Inviting you now to practice this for yourself, if you would like to.

Feet on the floor practice

Taking a few moments to explore the contact of your feet on the floor—not needing to move your feet or adjust your position—but simply placing your attention down to your feet, and exploring sensations of contact in your toes, as if this was the first time that you have ever felt your toes in contact with the floor... then after a while, moving to the soles of the feet...and then your heels... feeling your feet held by the solidity of the floor beneath you... staying with this and exploring these sensations for a moment.

Then, if you would like to, moving your attention to the contact of your body with the chair... maybe feeling your sit bones connecting with the seat of the chair... noticing how this feels to you... not thinking about it, but just sensing it directly as best you can.

Finally, bringing awareness to the weight of you going down onto the floor through your feet, and through your buttocks onto the chair– held and supported by the ground beneath you. Perhaps asking yourself, ‘What am I aware of right now’?

In this simple practice, we are deliberately becoming curious about the sensations of contact. Over time, we find that coming back to the body with curiosity, as if for the first time (every time), we slow down. What is happening here?

Most of the time, the mind and body almost seem to function independently. The body might be sitting without any particularly noticeable sensations—however the mind is off planning dinner, or thinking about what someone said to us yesterday, or just vaguely spacing out.

Once we start becoming more aware of our present physical experience, we discover that we are often on ‘automatic’. We might be eating a meal, whilst vaguely planning something for tomorrow—or driving the car, but not really aware of the countryside we are passing. Whilst this is quite normal, it also lays us open to potential problems. For when the mind is ‘free-floating’, we are at the mercy of habits of mind that have built up over a lifetime. We are then more likely to be influenced by personal history or past trauma.

Like background traffic noise that we screen out and are barely aware of, these patterns of mind influence our actions, affecting the mood. Being on ‘automatic’ may be normal, but it limits our choices. We tend to react to what happens in predictable ways, invariably adding 'extra' to the event, with an overlay of negative or critical thoughts. This tends to keep us stuck in grooves of difficulty that echo back to the past, and resonate forward into the future.

Jennifer, an experienced mindfulness teacher was leading a large graduate class of people who had all attended 8-week mindfulness-based courses. In the room was a woman who was obviously going through treatment for cancer. Jennifer made the point that for some people—in the moment—the appearance of a damp patch on the wall might be worse than having cancer. Some of the group looked shocked and turned to look at the woman with cancer to see how she was reacting. She nodded her head and, laughing, volunteered the comment that she had a particularly house-proud friend, for whom noticing a damp patch would be a major drama!

The point that the teacher was making was not that having cancer is a breeze, but that we all have the capacity—in the moment—to react way out of proportion to an event if certain personal patterns are triggered. By learning to regularly ‘come back’ to the body and the breath, we can start to wake up out of automatic, notice the reactive patterns as they arise and regain the opportunity to be more present to our experience.

Anne had a teenage son, Alan, who had a rare and incurable illness. She nursed him at home whenever possible. This put a huge strain on her and her family, and Anne knew that she was close to breaking point.

She was referred to a mindfulness course and met Jane, a mindfulness teacher. Neither of them felt that this was a good time for Anne to attend the course, as she was so troubled. So they decided that Anne would go and practice ‘Feet on the Floor’ fora few weeks, to see how she got on. Anne returned saying the practice had definitely helped and she was keen to learn more.

Later, on the course, she was given a little thread bracelet with a red bead on it as an aide to help her remember to ‘come back’. Anne’s group was told of rural South African mothers caring for their young with Aids, who were also wearing these threads. Anne was heard to comment ‘I don’t feel so alone’.

When we practice being present with our experience, we uncover qualities of compassion and kindness both for ourselves and others. This is not separate from the practice of being present. It is integral to it. Recent research showed increases in self-compassion to be one of the key ways that Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression has its beneficial effects (Kuyken, 2010).

Coming to the Breath

This is another practice which is important in signposting us back into the body. It offers us an anchor to come back to—and a way of exploring detailed sensations, deep in the body.

Coming to the breath practice

1. ‘Feeling your feet on the floor—weight going down—and noticing your spine rising out of the pelvis up through the back—height going up’.

2. ‘Then becoming aware of the fact that you are breathing... Letting the breath breathe itself—not interfering with it in any way... Simply feeling the sensations of the breath, deep in the body... as it breathes in and breathes out.’

3. ‘If at any point, you notice that your mind has wandered away from the breath... distracted by a thought or a sound, remembering thatthis is not a problem—it is what minds do... and as soon as you realize that you have wandered away, gently coming back to the anchor of the breath... and to the sensations of the breath breathing in and breathing out’.

We can do this practice for a few moments, or a minute or two—and back to the breath during the day. Indeed, we can create our own practices to suit us, whatever we are doing. Here are some ideas:

• Standing with my feet on the ground, pausing and noticing, and coming to the breath.
• Feeling the water on my back in the shower and smelling the soap. How am I right now?
• Getting into bed and deliberately feeling the bedclothes touching me
• Eating mindfully—really seeing, smelling and tasting my food.
• Going for a walk and ‘being there’ for each footfall.

We can also build in reminders and routines to help us remember to practice. Cultivating clear intention is key to this.

Turning Towards

Once we have learnt to regularly come back to the body, and begun to notice when we have been on ‘automatic pilot’, we can then start to look at what happens when our ‘buttons get pressed’—or when things start to ‘amp up’ a bit.

So unpicking this a little—it is worth noting that every experience we have results in pleasant, unpleasant or neutral feelings (when things are neither pleasant nor unpleasant). What happens next is important.

We generally want to hold onto the experiences that feel pleasant. We want more of them. We want them to last longer, or repeat again and again. Sensations in the body are likely to be ones of warmth, openness, lightness, flow and ease.

We usually pull away from things that result in unpleasant feelings. We try to avoid them. We tense against them. Sensations in the body might be constricted, painful, agitated, hot and tight. Thoughts in the mind can move towards blame, judgment, and rumination—adding a lot extra to what is already unpleasant.

Neutral feelings and experiences will usually not be noticed at all—and when they are, they turn into something else, pleasant or unpleasant.

We can readily appreciate the consequences of the ways we tend to react to unpleasant events. This is the picture of stress, distress, or worse. What is trickier is to appreciate what unfolds when we try to hold onto pleasant feelings. Perhaps it might help to draw this out with a fairly trivial example.

I’m in my favorite coffee shop and am delighted to notice that there is carrot cake today. Ordering some, I start eating it with relish, and almost immediately think about whether to have a second piece.

In that moment of wanting more, and thinking about getting more, I am no longer enjoying the taste of the cake. In fact I may well finish the cake, without actually tasting much more than the first mouthful! The pleasant experience triggers wanting more, and soon there is just ‘wanting’, which is not pleasant. Eating is an obvious example, but there are many others that bombard us every day. We may discover that ‘wanting’ is as much, or more, of a problem to us than ‘not wanting’.

A short practice called ‘The Physical Barometer’ (Bartley, 2012) allows us to become aware of these feelings that can, in extreme, move into obsessive craving or strong aversion.

If you have ever seen someone consulting a old fashioned barometer, you will know that you need to gently tap on the glass front to see if the needle moves up or down and by how much. From this, it may be possible to forecast upcoming weather. We can use our bodies in a similar way to give us sensitive information about the emotional ‘weather’ arising for us. Here is how you do this:

The physical barometer

1. Determine some part of the body—preferably in the trunk—such as the chest area or the abdomen or somewhere between the two—that for you is especially sensitive to stress and difficulty. Place your hand there.

2. Once you have found the place, it can become your ‘physical barometer’. Tuning into it regularly, you may notice different sensations at different times. When you are under pressure, feeling anxious, or frustrated, you may notice sensations of tension, tightness, shakiness, or discomfort. The intensity of these sensations varies, depending on the level of your difficulty.

3. As you get used to practicing this, you can become aware of quite subtle sensations that may signal that something is brewing for you, long before you are consciously aware of this. Being curious about these sensations moment by moment, without attempting to change them, means you can respond to what is arising quite differently—perhaps with more choice and kindness.

If this practice interests you, you might want to try it several times a day, as a way of developing the habit of tuning into the body. It helps to hook the practice onto an existing activity—such as boiling the kettle, or starting the car—in order to remember it better.

The Physical Barometer enables us to catch things early, before the ‘weather’ has really dug in. The practice also helps us to notice and appreciate all those pleasant little moments that are so easily overlooked in our busyness.

By practicing in this way, feelings and sensations in the body become allies in helping us relate more gently to the reactivity of the mind. In time, we become more able to respond more skillfully to the ups and downs in life. We discover we have choices and this can offer us some wonderful moments of freedom and well-being.

In Conclusion

Mary Oliver offers us wise advice in her poem ‘The Summer Day’: ‘let the animal of your body love what it loves’. (Oliver, 1992)

In our brief exploration of being present to the connection between body and mind, we have been discovering how to move closer to the body and how helpfully the mind responds when we do. Although it requires a certain effort, it is not so difficult. Simple practices such as ‘Feet on the Floor’ and ‘Coming to the Breath’ invite us to come back to the present. The body offers us a way of doing that – for it changes less quickly than the mind. The body resonates with feelings in parallel with the nuances of the mind—whether these are pleasant or unpleasant. Investigating this for ourselves, we find a potential to interrupt the triggers that bind us. With diligence and practice, we can discover for ourselves a rich vein of present experience that simply asks us to be here—and in that moment allows us to open and be more kind to ourselves and the world.

‘The present is the only time any of us have to be alive, to learn, to heal – indeed, to love’.

-Kabat-Zinn, 1990

With my thanks to Jody Mardula from the Centre for Mindfulness, Research and Practice, Bangor University, Wales.

About the Author

Trish Bartley has been teaching mindfulness and leading mindfulness-based training for over 12 years. She has considerable experience in introducing mindfulness to the general public and is also involved in training health professionals to teach mindfulness-based approaches. She has a background in development and has led training processes in South Africa since 1997. She now specializes in working with people with cancer and other life-threatening diseases. She has developed an intervention known as Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Cancer, based on the “classical”, 8-week mindfulness course that has been clinically tried and tested with people with cancer over more than 10 years. She works mostly in the UK and leads workshops and retreats internationally. Trish is the author of Holding Up the Sky: Love Power and Learning in the Development of a Community (2003) and of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for Cancer: Gently Turning Towards (2012).

References

Bartley, T. (2012). Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Cancer: Gently Turning Towards. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell

Burch, V., (2008). Living Well with Pain and Illness: The mindful way to free yourself from suffering. London: Piatkus

Kabat-Zinn, J., (1990) Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness. New York: Delta

Kuyken, W., Watkins, E., Holden, E., White, K., Taylor, et al. (2010) How does mindfulness-based Cognitive therapy work? Behaviour Research and Therapy, 48(11), 1105-1112

Oliver, M. (1992). New and Selected Poems. Boston: Beacon Press.

Segal, Z.V., Williams, J.M.G., Teasdale, J.D., (2002) Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression: A new approach to preventing relapse. New York: Guilford Press.

Williams, J.M.G., Teasdale, J.D., Segal, Z.V., & Kabat-Zinn, J., (2007). The mindful way through depression: Freeing yourself from chronic unhappiness. New York: Guilford Press.

Williams, M., and Penman, D., (2011) Mindfulness: a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world. London: Piatkus.

This article was first published in New Therapist: http://www.newtherapist.com/

‘The tragedy for too many of us is not that our lives are too short but that we take so long before we start to live them.’ -Williams et al., 2007

Jon Kabat-Zinn, who developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (Kabat-Zinn, 1990) often quotes James Joyce, who famously wrote about Mr. Duffy.... who “lived a short distance from his body”. This seems to be true of most of us!

We live and breathe in these bodies. One day this body will die and the ‘I’, as we know it, will cease. And yet what Jon Kabat-Zinn is pointing towards is the fact that we are so rarely present in this body. There are so few times each day that the mind and the body come together. The body might be here, but the mind is generally off somewhere else. Most of us live most of the time in our heads— thinking. We rush from place to place—from task to task. We are so busy and as a result, we miss so much of our lives.

In this article, I will suggest some ways of coming back to the body—of recapturing more of the moments in our lives. This needs a certain commitment to practice—but we find, quite soon, that there is some tangible benefit. With a kindly and curious intention, this ‘simple’ business of coming back to the body has a steadying and balancing effect. The mind seems to calm down—and we start to slow down, and are able to appreciate things a bit more.

We will explore this ‘coming back’, with some simple short exercises. Mindfulness practice is relevant to everyone, whether dealing with the general ups and downs of normal living, or facing particular challenging circumstances. With this in mind, we will read about people facing serious illness who found practices that helped them.

We will then look at the way the body offers us clues to upcoming ‘edges’, if we are sufficiently aware. By noticing and exploring physical sensations, as they arise, we can find different ways of relating to the mind. We find that the body can function a bit like a barometer for us, pointing to upcoming emotional ‘weather’. This offers an opportunity to respond to what is arising, rather than move into our usual knee-jerk reactions.

This article is written for you as individuals first and therapists second. I see it as vital for us to practice what we teach. Any other way will not work. We need to learn to practice awareness for ourselves—before we can be skillful in guiding others to practice this for themselves. This article is written in the service of inviting you, the reader, to try out these approaches, hoping that they will be of use to you. Later, you may decide to share them with those with whom you work.

Learning To Live Again

As well as offering us more choice with what we find difficult in our lives, the practice of being mindful offers us ways of learning to appreciate, feel more alive and be more present to our world. We may well find we are more creative when we slow down to life. We discover the capacity to be openand compassionate. In essence, we may learn to love our lives again—to find joy and contentment in the simple things.

Susan, 35, and single parent of two young children, always appeared cheerful. Even when diagnosed with incurable cancer, she moved into treatment with extraordinary courage and energy. At the end, she was told that it had been so successful that she had a good chance of cure. Almost immediately, she felt herself going to pieces. She became irritable, angry, distressed and terribly anxious.

Over the 8 weeks of her mindfulness course, she learnt about the benefit of coming back to her body. She found ways of relating to sensations of fear and panic with kindness instead of judgment. At the end of the course, she was still experiencing anxiety, but she now had tools that helped her relate to it differently. She found this changed things considerably. At the last class, she described climbing to the top of a mountain with her children, feeling such pleasure that they had made it together. It was a lovely metaphor for what they had been through.

Coming Back To The Body

It seems that we only give attention to the body when we get ill or hurt ourselves—and even then, our attention is glancing, intermittent, invariably accompanied by judging thoughts and anxious pre-occupation. Our focus is more directed at getting rid of the pain or illness than experiencing it.

‘...Although turning your attention towards your pain may seem scary, people on our courses often say that it’s a tremendous relief. For those of us with chronic conditions, changing our relationship with them is often the very best medicine’ - Burch, 2008

However, most of us are a long way from being with our bodies as they are. We seem fixated on changing them for the better. We want to keep looking young, so we buy creams and potions to slow down ageing. We go on endless diets. We even consider cosmetic surgery—all in the interests of improving the appearance of the body. How might it be to practice being present with the body just as it is, in this moment? What might that offer?

Interestingly, there is ongoing research looking into the effects of mindfulness on cellular ageing and much else. Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy has been shown to halve the risk of relapse in those who have had three of more episodes of depression (Segal et al., 2002). Evidence shows mindfulness as benefitting a wide range of people with all sorts of physical and mental health conditions. Most significantly of all, it has something to offer those of us who simply want to be happier and more skillful in our lives.

So in order to develop this art of being present now, let us start with something straightforward. Inviting you to bring your attention to knowing that you are sitting here. The body has to be involved in this ‘knowing’. We are not so much thinking about sitting, but bringing direct sensate awareness to the actual physical ‘experiencing’ of sitting.

There is a lovely old story of two meditation teachers talking together. One is much older than the other. The younger one turns to the older teacher to ask ‘How is it that your students do so much better than mine? What do you teach them?’ The older one replies that he teaches his students to practice sitting, and standing and walking. ‘But that is exactly what I teach my students’, retorts the younger teacher. ‘Ah’, says the wise old teacher, ‘but when my students stand, they know they are standing—and when they sit, they know they are sitting—and when they walk, they know they are walking’.

So there we have it. Inviting you now to practice this for yourself, if you would like to.

Feet on the floor practice

Taking a few moments to explore the contact of your feet on the floor—not needing to move your feet or adjust your position—but simply placing your attention down to your feet, and exploring sensations of contact in your toes, as if this was the first time that you have ever felt your toes in contact with the floor... then after a while, moving to the soles of the feet...and then your heels... feeling your feet held by the solidity of the floor beneath you... staying with this and exploring these sensations for a moment.

Then, if you would like to, moving your attention to the contact of your body with the chair... maybe feeling your sit bones connecting with the seat of the chair... noticing how this feels to you... not thinking about it, but just sensing it directly as best you can.

Finally, bringing awareness to the weight of you going down onto the floor through your feet, and through your buttocks onto the chair– held and supported by the ground beneath you. Perhaps asking yourself, ‘What am I aware of right now’?

In this simple practice, we are deliberately becoming curious about the sensations of contact. Over time, we find that coming back to the body with curiosity, as if for the first time (every time), we slow down. What is happening here?

Most of the time, the mind and body almost seem to function independently. The body might be sitting without any particularly noticeable sensations—however the mind is off planning dinner, or thinking about what someone said to us yesterday, or just vaguely spacing out.

Once we start becoming more aware of our present physical experience, we discover that we are often on ‘automatic’. We might be eating a meal, whilst vaguely planning something for tomorrow—or driving the car, but not really aware of the countryside we are passing. Whilst this is quite normal, it also lays us open to potential problems. For when the mind is ‘free-floating’, we are at the mercy of habits of mind that have built up over a lifetime. We are then more likely to be influenced by personal history or past trauma.

Like background traffic noise that we screen out and are barely aware of, these patterns of mind influence our actions, affecting the mood. Being on ‘automatic’ may be normal, but it limits our choices. We tend to react to what happens in predictable ways, invariably adding 'extra' to the event, with an overlay of negative or critical thoughts. This tends to keep us stuck in grooves of difficulty that echo back to the past, and resonate forward into the future.

Jennifer, an experienced mindfulness teacher was leading a large graduate class of people who had all attended 8-week mindfulness-based courses. In the room was a woman who was obviously going through treatment for cancer. Jennifer made the point that for some people—in the moment—the appearance of a damp patch on the wall might be worse than having cancer. Some of the group looked shocked and turned to look at the woman with cancer to see how she was reacting. She nodded her head and, laughing, volunteered the comment that she had a particularly house-proud friend, for whom noticing a damp patch would be a major drama!

The point that the teacher was making was not that having cancer is a breeze, but that we all have the capacity—in the moment—to react way out of proportion to an event if certain personal patterns are triggered. By learning to regularly ‘come back’ to the body and the breath, we can start to wake up out of automatic, notice the reactive patterns as they arise and regain the opportunity to be more present to our experience.

Anne had a teenage son, Alan, who had a rare and incurable illness. She nursed him at home whenever possible. This put a huge strain on her and her family, and Anne knew that she was close to breaking point.

She was referred to a mindfulness course and met Jane, a mindfulness teacher. Neither of them felt that this was a good time for Anne to attend the course, as she was so troubled. So they decided that Anne would go and practice ‘Feet on the Floor’ fora few weeks, to see how she got on. Anne returned saying the practice had definitely helped and she was keen to learn more.

Later, on the course, she was given a little thread bracelet with a red bead on it as an aide to help her remember to ‘come back’. Anne’s group was told of rural South African mothers caring for their young with Aids, who were also wearing these threads. Anne was heard to comment ‘I don’t feel so alone’.

When we practice being present with our experience, we uncover qualities of compassion and kindness both for ourselves and others. This is not separate from the practice of being present. It is integral to it. Recent research showed increases in self-compassion to be one of the key ways that Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression has its beneficial effects (Kuyken, 2010).

Coming to the Breath

This is another practice which is important in signposting us back into the body. It offers us an anchor to come back to—and a way of exploring detailed sensations, deep in the body.

Coming to the breath practice

1. ‘Feeling your feet on the floor—weight going down—and noticing your spine rising out of the pelvis up through the back—height going up’.

2. ‘Then becoming aware of the fact that you are breathing... Letting the breath breathe itself—not interfering with it in any way... Simply feeling the sensations of the breath, deep in the body... as it breathes in and breathes out.’

3. ‘If at any point, you notice that your mind has wandered away from the breath... distracted by a thought or a sound, remembering thatthis is not a problem—it is what minds do... and as soon as you realize that you have wandered away, gently coming back to the anchor of the breath... and to the sensations of the breath breathing in and breathing out’.

We can do this practice for a few moments, or a minute or two—and back to the breath during the day. Indeed, we can create our own practices to suit us, whatever we are doing. Here are some ideas:

• Standing with my feet on the ground, pausing and noticing, and coming to the breath.
• Feeling the water on my back in the shower and smelling the soap. How am I right now?
• Getting into bed and deliberately feeling the bedclothes touching me
• Eating mindfully—really seeing, smelling and tasting my food.
• Going for a walk and ‘being there’ for each footfall.

We can also build in reminders and routines to help us remember to practice. Cultivating clear intention is key to this.

Turning Towards

Once we have learnt to regularly come back to the body, and begun to notice when we have been on ‘automatic pilot’, we can then start to look at what happens when our ‘buttons get pressed’—or when things start to ‘amp up’ a bit.

So unpicking this a little—it is worth noting that every experience we have results in pleasant, unpleasant or neutral feelings (when things are neither pleasant nor unpleasant). What happens next is important.

We generally want to hold onto the experiences that feel pleasant. We want more of them. We want them to last longer, or repeat again and again. Sensations in the body are likely to be ones of warmth, openness, lightness, flow and ease.

We usually pull away from things that result in unpleasant feelings. We try to avoid them. We tense against them. Sensations in the body might be constricted, painful, agitated, hot and tight. Thoughts in the mind can move towards blame, judgment, and rumination—adding a lot extra to what is already unpleasant.

Neutral feelings and experiences will usually not be noticed at all—and when they are, they turn into something else, pleasant or unpleasant.

We can readily appreciate the consequences of the ways we tend to react to unpleasant events. This is the picture of stress, distress, or worse. What is trickier is to appreciate what unfolds when we try to hold onto pleasant feelings. Perhaps it might help to draw this out with a fairly trivial example.

I’m in my favorite coffee shop and am delighted to notice that there is carrot cake today. Ordering some, I start eating it with relish, and almost immediately think about whether to have a second piece.

In that moment of wanting more, and thinking about getting more, I am no longer enjoying the taste of the cake. In fact I may well finish the cake, without actually tasting much more than the first mouthful! The pleasant experience triggers wanting more, and soon there is just ‘wanting’, which is not pleasant. Eating is an obvious example, but there are many others that bombard us every day. We may discover that ‘wanting’ is as much, or more, of a problem to us than ‘not wanting’.

A short practice called ‘The Physical Barometer’ (Bartley, 2012) allows us to become aware of these feelings that can, in extreme, move into obsessive craving or strong aversion.

If you have ever seen someone consulting a old fashioned barometer, you will know that you need to gently tap on the glass front to see if the needle moves up or down and by how much. From this, it may be possible to forecast upcoming weather. We can use our bodies in a similar way to give us sensitive information about the emotional ‘weather’ arising for us. Here is how you do this:

The physical barometer

1. Determine some part of the body—preferably in the trunk—such as the chest area or the abdomen or somewhere between the two—that for you is especially sensitive to stress and difficulty. Place your hand there.

2. Once you have found the place, it can become your ‘physical barometer’. Tuning into it regularly, you may notice different sensations at different times. When you are under pressure, feeling anxious, or frustrated, you may notice sensations of tension, tightness, shakiness, or discomfort. The intensity of these sensations varies, depending on the level of your difficulty.

3. As you get used to practicing this, you can become aware of quite subtle sensations that may signal that something is brewing for you, long before you are consciously aware of this. Being curious about these sensations moment by moment, without attempting to change them, means you can respond to what is arising quite differently—perhaps with more choice and kindness.

If this practice interests you, you might want to try it several times a day, as a way of developing the habit of tuning into the body. It helps to hook the practice onto an existing activity—such as boiling the kettle, or starting the car—in order to remember it better.

The Physical Barometer enables us to catch things early, before the ‘weather’ has really dug in. The practice also helps us to notice and appreciate all those pleasant little moments that are so easily overlooked in our busyness.

By practicing in this way, feelings and sensations in the body become allies in helping us relate more gently to the reactivity of the mind. In time, we become more able to respond more skillfully to the ups and downs in life. We discover we have choices and this can offer us some wonderful moments of freedom and well-being.

In Conclusion

Mary Oliver offers us wise advice in her poem ‘The Summer Day’: ‘let the animal of your body love what it loves’. (Oliver, 1992)

In our brief exploration of being present to the connection between body and mind, we have been discovering how to move closer to the body and how helpfully the mind responds when we do. Although it requires a certain effort, it is not so difficult. Simple practices such as ‘Feet on the Floor’ and ‘Coming to the Breath’ invite us to come back to the present. The body offers us a way of doing that – for it changes less quickly than the mind. The body resonates with feelings in parallel with the nuances of the mind—whether these are pleasant or unpleasant. Investigating this for ourselves, we find a potential to interrupt the triggers that bind us. With diligence and practice, we can discover for ourselves a rich vein of present experience that simply asks us to be here—and in that moment allows us to open and be more kind to ourselves and the world.

‘The present is the only time any of us have to be alive, to learn, to heal – indeed, to love’.

-Kabat-Zinn, 1990

With my thanks to Jody Mardula from the Centre for Mindfulness, Research and Practice, Bangor University, Wales.

About the Author

Trish Bartley has been teaching mindfulness and leading mindfulness-based training for over 12 years. She has considerable experience in introducing mindfulness to the general public and is also involved in training health professionals to teach mindfulness-based approaches. She has a background in development and has led training processes in South Africa since 1997. She now specializes in working with people with cancer and other life-threatening diseases. She has developed an intervention known as Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Cancer, based on the “classical”, 8-week mindfulness course that has been clinically tried and tested with people with cancer over more than 10 years. She works mostly in the UK and leads workshops and retreats internationally. Trish is the author of Holding Up the Sky: Love Power and Learning in the Development of a Community (2003) and of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for Cancer: Gently Turning Towards (2012).

References

Bartley, T. (2012). Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Cancer: Gently Turning Towards. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell

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Kabat-Zinn, J., (1990) Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness. New York: Delta

Kuyken, W., Watkins, E., Holden, E., White, K., Taylor, et al. (2010) How does mindfulness-based Cognitive therapy work? Behaviour Research and Therapy, 48(11), 1105-1112

Oliver, M. (1992). New and Selected Poems. Boston: Beacon Press.

Segal, Z.V., Williams, J.M.G., Teasdale, J.D., (2002) Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression: A new approach to preventing relapse. New York: Guilford Press.

Williams, J.M.G., Teasdale, J.D., Segal, Z.V., & Kabat-Zinn, J., (2007). The mindful way through depression: Freeing yourself from chronic unhappiness. New York: Guilford Press.

Williams, M., and Penman, D., (2011) Mindfulness: a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world. London: Piatkus.

This article was first published in New Therapist: http://www.newtherapist.com/