So what do we teach at Breathworks? It's very simple. I think this is one of things that
I've learned from my own experience is, keep it simple. Mindfulness is not rocket science,
you know, I think as Anita said, it's simple to understand but hard to practice, that kind
of idea, but we can wrap it up in all kinds of complexity but actually it's very, very
simple and the basic problem that one has, when you're living with a chronic health condition
is that you don't like it. Really what your living with is "I don't like this", and the
way I don't like this gets lived out in your life is very distressing and very unpleasant.
So how mindfulness can help is you're learning, or you're teaching people, how to move away
from this "I don't like this" system of living to turning towards it, which is very counterintuitive.
It takes a lot of courage to learn to turn towards the difficult. And then what you do
is you investigate what's actually happening, not what you think is happening, or what you
fear is happening, or what happened yesterday, but what is actually happening right now,
so you look at it in quite a lot of detail. However, crucially, you do this with tenderness,
and care, and acceptance, and compassion. So it's not a kind of, put it under the microscope
approach, but it's embrace it the way you would hold a child that was hurting. It's like,
you know, "What's wrong?", why, you know, "How can I help you?" So you relate to your
own difficulty with great tenderness. And, then crucially, this is the kind of crucial
theoretical part of our program. You can unpack that experience into what we call primary
and secondary suffering. So rather than it being just a great big blob of "I don't like
this", it becomes "I have some unpleasant sensations", "I can accept those", and then
you realize how it's the resistance to the unwanted that's causing most of your distress.
Resistance, Primary Sensations + Resistance = Secondary Suffering. And that's all the mental,
emotional, and physical reactions, things like catastrophizing thinking, depression, anxiety,
fear, and of course, secondary physical tension. You've got pain, you tense against it, and
then you got more pain. So we use this exercise on our program, which is fun, so that person
on the, on your left, has got a blue cushion on her lap which represents the unpleasant
sensations in her back, say, for someone with back pain, let's say for arguments sake, and
then we get other people in the group to pile all these other cushions on, which are all
the secondary reactions: I can't go to work anymore, nobody likes me anymore, maybe I'm
going to end up in a wheelchair, I can't walk the dog anymore, and you end up just burdened
by all these cushions, all the secondary suffering. It's a very good exercise, you can steal if
you want, very, very useful, because it's very felt. That person there, she's burdened,
isn't she? She can't see out anymore and she's weighed down by all this secondary suffering.
And she can let go of all the red cushions. They're all optional. The blue cushion isn't optional.
So mindfulness helps us accept the blue cushion, the primary suffering, to soften or dissolve
resistance that's very, that's kind of crucial training, and then to reduce or even overcome
the secondary suffering, so one can have pain and have an excellent quality of life. That's
the thing that we're showing people. Very quickly the methods: We take three different
formal meditation practices, a body scan, mindfulness of breathing, and kindly awareness,
which is based on a Buddhist practice called the development of loving-kindness. So that
gets an equal weight with mindfulness, but with research, I'm not quite sure how we'd
work out which one was effective, but it seems to work, so that's the main thing. We teach
mindfulness in daily life in a very systematic and detailed way, because that's very, very
important for people who are living with chronic health conditions. Meditating on today is
helpful, but then you've got another 23 hours to go crazy in, so we really unpack it in
a very specific way. For example, I use a timer when I'm working, and after 20 minutes
I stand up, and that's changed my life more than meditating, because that's really changed
my behavior. So one of their phrases that we use is, take a break before you need it.
That's the take-home little phrase you can have: Take a break before you need it. I think
intuitively as human beings we push the envelope, and we keep going until we're desperate, and
then we crash and we have this kind of pushing and crashing cycle, so take a break before
you need it. We teach mindful movement. I'm going to teach a little one in a moment, and
everything that we do is based around the breath and learning to rest into gravity.
Gravity's remarkable, it's here all the time, and very often we're kind of pulling away
from gravity, which creates a lot of secondary tension. So we're just going to do a little
experiential thing now, even though I'm told I've only got 5 minutes left, just to show
how simple this is, so if you just sit comfortably, and I would like you to make a fist with one
hand... What's happened to your breath?... Anyone breathing? Yeah? Yeah, did people
find their breath stopped when they made the fist? Yeah. So that's that's what happens
when you have pain or the unwanted in your body. It's like you got a fist in your body,
and not only have you got the tension, but you've got this inhibited breathing around
the body So now, I'd like you to drop into gravity, really sort of rest down onto the
chair, just imagine that you're allowing your body to be held by gravity and you got your
fist, and imagine breathing into the fist. And what does the fist want to do?.. ...does
it want to soften?... Yeah, so that's one of the main trainings. So it's learning how
to drop into the body, drop into gravity, identify these kind of areas of holding in
the body, and then learn how to take the breath into those, and to soften, and dissolve, and
that's a very, very good way of releasing this impulse to secondary suffering. So just
a couple of drawings about the kind of theory, again, of the way we work. So, the unaware
human being tends to live, strung out, we don't like the unpleasant, we're pushing away
the unpleasant and we're pulling the pleasant towards us, so the pain is the unpleasant,
don't like that, ohh, want more of that, and does that look comfortable?!? Interestingly
it's a crucifix as well, which I find quite interesting. So you're sort of crucified on
your impulses of trying to avoid the pain and to prolong pleasure. So what we're doing
is we're learning and teaching people to turn towards the pain with tenderness, and the
dotted lines mean you're seeing into the fluid nature of experience. This is very very important,
'coz people think of pain has being solid, the enemy, a thing... Actually it's just a
flow of sensations that are ever changing. And we don't leave people there. We do not
leave, we don't leave people to turn towards the pain, and seeing into its nature. That
would be not a very pleasant way of living. So then we get people to hold that, but then
to also pay attention to what's pleasant. And we've not yet found anyone on a program
who couldn't find something pleasant, which I think is very, very interesting, because
people can think oh, there's nothing pleasant, my life is awful, but it might be, you've
got a soft, a softness, in your face, your hands are warm, your tummy's soft, you're
not hungry, that might be pleasant. In hospital, it might be that the sheets on the bed clean.
That can be extraordinarily pleasant when you're in a lot of suffering. And then you
hold both, and you see into their fluid and changing nature, so you're no longer strung
out, but you're just resting back, and it's a very broad, open awareness, and you're just
allowing everything to rise and fall and rise and fall, moment by moment and that's a much
more restful whole, healthy way of living. And we don't end with self. This is also very,
very important. It's not just a self-awareness training, but you then expand your awareness
to include awareness of others, and the world around you. And you realize how we're also
very, very alike. We look different, but we're all very, very similar. And this overcomes
this preoccupation with self, and one's own problems, and you shift from a perception
of isolation, you know, I'm the only one in pain, and you're all healthy, which is often
the perception that one has when you've got a health condition, you look out to the world
and you think they've got perfect lives, and my life is terrible. But you realize it's
not like that. Every single one of you, I know, have some kind of difficulty in your
lives, just like me, and we also have this explicit cultivation of compassion... So,
things we're doing now... I wrote this book in 2008 that's now out in 12 languages. The
title in Swedish is different, but the English title is very important, actually, which is:
Living Well WITH Pain and Illness, so it's not overcoming pain and illness, but learning
to live well with the human condition, that includes pain and illness.