Mindfulness: A practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world

Kindness transforms things: the ‘aversion’ pathways in the mind are switched off and the ‘approach’ ones switched on instead. This change in attitude enhances openness, creativity and happiness, while at the same time dissolving the fears, guilts, anxieties and stresses that lead to exhaustion and chronic discontent.

Doing mode only becomes a ‘problem’ when it volunteers for a task that it cannot do, such as ‘solving’ a troubling emotion. When this happens, it pays to ‘shift gear’ into ‘Being’ mode.

cradle

Further, Cara realised that she was also compounding her suffering, not only by saying, ‘I must be busy’, but also by repeating to herself, ‘Things used to be different.

You may wish to deepen this attitude of acceptance and openness to whatever sensations you are experiencing by saying to yourself from time to time: ‘It is here now. It is OK to feel this. Whatever it is, it’s already here. Let me open to it.’

Anxiety, stress, unhappiness and exhaustion are often symptoms of a wider and deeper malaise. They are not free-floating afflictions, but symptoms arising from the way we relate to each other, ourselves, and to the world itself. They are signals that there is something wrong in our lives. They are signs to which we need to pay attention.

We have begun the process of revealing how the mind works and raised the possibility that your thoughts are not you.

friend. If you simply accept life as it is, you will be a lot more fulfilled and increasingly worry free.

At first, the impact that this memory difficulty might have was unclear. Then it was found that the more people tended to retrieve memories in this non-specific way, the more difficulty they had in letting go of the past and the more affected they were by things going wrong in their lives right now and rebuilding their lives again after an upset.5