Techniques Archives - Mindful Call

Mindful day

We all know that a day is the 24 hours it takes as the earth rotates towards and away from the sun. Although the convention is to start the day from midnight, in medieval times the day began just after sunset. Some cultures and religions still use the sunset to mark this boundary today.

In the Western world, we have an average life expectancy of around 80 years, or 29,200 days, which seems generous when compared to the 24 hours of a mayfly; but in the fast-paced world we live in, days and weeks can easily flash past. Many of us share the same daily routine, which punctuates most of our working lives: we wake up, wash, eat, maybe travel, work, exercise, socialise, relax, and sleep. It’s no wonder that when we get caught up in the routine, one busy day merges into the next until the weekend arrives.

As far as we know, being born human gives us the greatest potential of any life form in the known universe. At the latest count, there are over two trillion galaxies, each with billions of stars. Astrophysicists speculate that almost all stars have planets, but only one in 100 billion supports life. We’re extremely fortunate to live on one of them, a watery planet that orbits its star at just the right distance called the Goldilocks zone. Even the orbit of our large moon accelerated evolution and contributed to the cycles of life on Earth.

On an everyday basis, we tend to get caught up in the human-scale activities, narratives, and dramas of our lives that are quite disconnected from this amazing cosmic reality. If every day is precious, how many days have we squandered by not fully appreciating the joy and wonder of being alive? It’s not that we expect to be mindfully aware of every moment of the day; there are bound to be times when we drift off in thought or get caught up in emotions, which is only human. It’s also unrealistic to expect each day to be an amazing, life-changing experience. Although some days will stand out, most will be average and relatively normal. So how can we meet each day with awareness, appreciation, and gratitude for what it means to be human, even when what we’re doing seems mundane?

Bringing mindful awareness into our day can make a real difference to how skilfully we work with whatever arises. One useful analogy is to imagine that we’re an experienced driver on a busy street. As we progress, we’re open and aware of whatever arises in our field of view: the mother with a pushchair waiting to cross the road, the wobbly cyclist, or the bus pulling out ahead. Alert, open, and aware, working with whatever arises, we respond skilfully to navigate a smooth and easy path through the situation.

Some practical steps for embedding mindfulness into your day include:

Waking: When you awake, before your head fills up with thoughts, turn your attention and awareness to your body and take a few aware breaths in appreciation and gratitude.
Presence: Use routine activities like cleaning your teeth or showering to let go of automatic thoughts for a moment and bring your attention to the present; to your senses and sensations.
Morning meditation: See if you can find 5, 10 or 15 minutes in your morning routine to simply sit and open your awareness to your body, breath, and senses, acknowledging any thoughts and feelings, but letting them come and go without getting caught up in them.
Breaks: Take regular mindful breaks of 5-10 minutes during to the day. If you can, go outside to appreciate nature, or look up at the open sky, which is a great way of finding a bit of peace and calm.
Pause: Let go of any mental and emotional energy and momentum when you come to the end of a task so that you’re ready to begin the new activity free from accumulated noise.
Relationships: Feel appreciation and gratitude for all your relationships with others, whether close or distant, bringing kindness and compassion to whoever you encounter.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the routine of the day. Before you know it, another week, a month, then a year has passed. By weaving regular formal and informal mindfulness practice into each day, you can improve your well-being and performance as well as your mental and physical health, which leads to a longer, healthier, and happier life.

Suggested weekly practice

Aim to start the day well with some peaceful and calm awareness when you wake up. Sending your attention and awareness to appreciate your body, rather than running off in thoughts.
Notice and appreciate things that are special and sacred during the day: your loved ones, the flowers or birdsong in the garden, the beautiful sky, for example.
Read an up-to-date book or watch a documentary on what we have discovered about the amazing wonder of nature and the universe. (for instance, on BBC iPlayer: The Green Planet with David Attenborough, Earth with Chris Packham, or Universe with Brian Cox)

Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware. There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then play the second audio to reflect on the day, then explore what it really means to be alive in the present moment.

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Sleep

If there was a pill that gave you energy, improved emotional resilience, and boosted cognitive performance, would you take it? What if this was freely available and was not a pill, but something you can do naturally? So, what is this amazing, secret thing? Well, it’s getting a proper night’s sleep. Although we are told that we need the right amount of exercise and nutrition to remain healthy, it turns out that sleep is even more important.

We all need a good night’s sleep, but many people have difficulty getting to sleep, have their sleep disrupted, or do not get enough. Many of these issues stem from our overly busy lifestyles and addiction to our always-on devices and screens. Since the pandemic, researchers have reported an increase in sleep disorders caused by changes in work-life boundaries, greater screen time, and general underlying anxiety.

Biologically we’re foraging hunter-gatherers who were built for a simple life that included a good amount of physical activity and socialising within a small group of mainly trusted and familiar people. Today, we are less active and healthy, interact with a much greater number of strangers, and lead more complex lives. So, it’s no wonder we sometimes experience problems with such an essential physiological process as sleeping.

There’s historical evidence that before street lighting appeared in the mid-1800s people used to have two separate periods of sleep each night. The first sleep would be for three or four hours, then wakefulness for two to three hours, followed by a second sleep until the morning. In experiments on natural sleep patterns, researchers discovered that this cycle may be more natural than the straight eight hours that we’ve become used to. So, people who wake in the night may actually be reverting to the sleep pattern we evolved with.

There’s a lot of science about the purpose and functions of sleep. Like many other animals, we go through a daily sleep cycle, which refreshes the body and mind. This includes the immune, skeletal, muscular, and nervous systems as well as our memory. Humans sleep in roughly ninety-minute cycles with between four or five REM, or “rapid eye movement”, and non-REM phases each night. Scientists believe that the fast eye movements of REM sleep relate to the visual elements of our dreams, which correlates with greater activity in the visual cortex.

An average adult needs around eight hours of sleep, about a third of our lives. If we go without sleep, or our sleep is disrupted, we suffer from mental and physical fatigue, which affects our health, mood, well-being, and performance. If you have ever experienced a bad night’s sleep you may have noticed that it takes a few nights to recover your “sleep debt”, which can accumulate over time. Insomnia, the difficulty in falling or remaining asleep, is the most common sleep disorder and affects around ten percent of the population. Over time, insomnia can cause serious health issues including an increased risk of type two diabetes, heart disease, and reduced immunity.

So, what are the practical things you can do to improve the quality of your sleep?

If you can, get some exercise in the morning, or early afternoon
Wind down and relax in the hours before bedtime
Limit consumption of caffeine-based drinks and other stimulants after midday
Avoid tackling a stressful or difficult conversation in the hours before bedtime
Apart from reading a book, avoid smartphones, tablets, and other devices for at least an hour before bedtime

If you find that you cannot get to sleep, or wake up in the middle of the night with an over-active mind, here’s a mindful sleeping process that may help:

See what’s going on in your mind
Train your mind to allow you to sleep
Relax your body and take some deep slow breaths
Shift your attention and awareness away from your head
Use curiosity and beginner’s mind to really explore the sensations in your body
And every time that the mind grabs your attention, gently take your attention back to your body away from your head
Until you enter a deep sleep…

For more detail on this process play or download the guided practice below.

We all experience times of stress and difficulty in our lives that sometimes disrupt our sleep. Getting a good night’s sleep is critical to how we perform during the day and has an impact on both our physical and mental health. The good news is that there are practical things we can do to improve the quality of our sleep, which will benefit our health, happiness, well-being, and performance. Pleasant dreams!

Suggested weekly practice

If you are not sleeping well, keep a journal of your sleep patterns during the week. This could be done by noting the start, and end times and the quality of your sleep in a notebook, an app, or using a health and fitness tracker device if you have one.
If you cannot get to sleep, or wake and have difficulty getting back to sleep, try running through the process described above, or play the guided audio Mindful Sleep practice.
Settle thoughts by bringing your attention to your breath and body and train your mind to stop serving your thoughts when you need to sleep. Also, relax your eyes, as there is a high correlation between eye movement and thought.

Guidance

Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified, and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware. There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then play the second practice which can be used to either wind down in preparation for a good night’s sleep or as a mindful sleep practice if your sleep is disrupted by an over-active mind.

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Endings and beginnings

When you think about it, life is full of endings and beginnings. The different schools, places we have lived, relationships, the twists and turns of our work life, and the different phases of life. Every story, film, book, and song, and every breath and heartbeat have a beginning and an ending. As the sun sets and rises every morning to begin a new day, nothing lasts for ever; permanence is relative, and everything is subject to change.

The recent news about buildings built in the UK between the 1950s to 1980s with a lightweight form of concrete known as RAAC (Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete), is a good example of impermanence in action. When these buildings were constructed the architects and local authorities failed to take the limited life of the construction material into account. Following two unexpected roof failures, this issue is now affecting 150 schools and 34 hospitals.

When we come to the end of something, especially something significant, we sometimes find ourselves resisting change that threatens a familiar comfort zone. We can easily become attached to our routines, which creates a bit of turbulence in our lives when they eventually change. Of course, there are some endings that we are excited about, that give us freedom and make us happy. In those cases, it’s often not the loss of something, but the opportunities of new beginnings. Even endings that make us feel loss and sadness can be opportunities for positive development and growth.

Ways of working skilfully with unwanted change include:

Being open and aware of the resistance to change in our body, emotions, and thoughts.
Becoming friendly with any feelings of stress, anxiety, anger, or sadness to do with the change, so we can see it for what it is, an automatic and unconscious reaction that is rooted in fear of the unknown and uncertain.
Acknowledging what we feel, and hearing what emotions are telling us, then allowing them to release in their own time.
Noticing our identification and attachment to what is threatened by the change
Fully accepting the change as if we had chosen it.
Embracing change as a natural part of life and an opportunity for growth and learning.
Bringing kindness and compassion to yourself and others.
Finding internal stability and balance – anchored within an embodied and aware presence. Dropping away from the noise and turbulence, to rest in the space and stillness behind the movement.
Appreciating and feeling gratitude for the present moment and the sense of connection with the people and experiences in our lives.
Like an experienced canoeist deftly working their way through the white water, skilfully navigating through the change with ease and flexibility.
Focusing on the positive outcomes, rather than dwelling on potential discomfort.

Although it makes sense to anticipate and plan for the future, we can never experience the reality until the unique moment arrives. So, we will always encounter a level of uncertainty in our future. What’s important is how we relate to and skilfully navigate the change as it arrives.

We can make a significant difference in how we respond to change by practising awareness, acceptance, resilience, and an appreciation for the present moment. By being open and aware, we can develop a more balanced, kinder, and compassionate approach to the inevitable changes that life throws at us.

Suggested weekly practice

Notice what you resist or push back on during the week. What are you attached to, or identifying with, so strongly that is driving this reaction?
Reflect on how skilfully, or not, you negotiated recent changes in your life. Where you are like the white-water canoeist, deftly paddling through the turbulent water, or were you overwhelmed and pulled under?
Remember to bring awareness, acceptance, balance, resilience, and kindness to endings, with openness, flexibility, and a focus on positive outcomes to new beginnings.

Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified, and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware. There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then play the second practice to investigate how we respond to change and rehearse using some mindfulness skills to improve our flexibility and resilience.

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Pause

From around ten thousand years ago, many of our farming ancestors survived by getting up at the crack of dawn and working until the sun went down. Until the 19th Century, there was no such thing as the “weekend” of two non-working days. Our ancestors would be amazed at the dishwashers, bread makers, and online grocery deliveries that make our lives easier now. Many of us have these modern conveniences, which, at one point in the past, were expected to herald a new age of leisure. So, what happened and why are we so busy? Part of the answer is that technology has allowed us to work at a faster pace and on a global scale. Much of our work is now information and knowledge-based, so there is a greater emphasis on education and specialization. Our lives are also more complicated than our ancestors. Where we can communicate across the world in an instant, our ancestors could spend their whole lives working on a village farm and never travel to the nearest city.

In today’s busy world it’s very easy to lose touch with the better part of ourselves; not the superficial “selfie” we present to others, but the deeper, reflective inner being, the quiet witness of our experience. It’s this deeper sense of self that the poet Derek Walcott touches on in his poem, Love after Love:

The time will come when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

Most of us lead busy work lives, rushing from one thing to another, with very little time to prepare for the next activity, with no time to pause, to reflect, and settle back within ourselves; no time to recover stability and balance. So, we enter the next activity of the day with our head already full of unfinished business, feeling a bit unsettled, possibly with physical symptoms of stress building up, then we continue this pattern over the rest of the day.

Surely there’s a better way?

One alternative is to take an intentional pause between activities, which allows us to check in with ourselves to notice what’s already here: Acknowledging prevailing thoughts and emotions pressing for attention, becoming aware of physical tightness and tension that we have accumulated, finding a bit of peace and calm, and expanding our awareness a little.

By pausing we create the space to rebalance and reconnect with the calm and open sense of who we are. No longer caught up in the choppy waves on the surface, we become the wide and deep ocean that contains them. Taking a pause is stepping off the treadmill of activity for a few moments.

Punctuating our day with intentional pauses can make a real difference to our general awareness, flexibility, well-being, and performance. Creating the space to skilfully respond, rather than automatically react.

Assuming there is a little bit of time before the next meeting, we could step outside for a few minutes, feeling the energy and aliveness of our body with a sense of gratitude and connecting with the soundscape around us to expand our awareness.

With a little more time, we can use an intentional pausing process, which, with practice, we can work through in a short space of time. In this process, we acknowledge our prevailing thoughts and emotions and release some tightness or tension. We can also bring kindness and compassion to ourselves as we adopt an open and accepting attitude to whatever arises, resting in a sense of stillness, stability, and balance, ready for the next activity.

The pause symbol of two vertical bars used on media controls is a variant of the square stop symbol and originally came from reel-to-reel tape machines. So, one way of seeing the pause button is that it represents the restful space between activities. By embedding a pause in our daily activity, we have greater access to the calm, open, and kinder sense of self that is the source of our greatest wisdom and potential.

Suggested weekly practice

See if you can start your day with an intentional pause as soon as you awake, noticing the sensations of your body, and following your breath without becoming distracted by running through your to-do list.
Every action during the day has a natural endpoint before the next activity. For instance, when you arrive at work, in between meetings, or after you’ve eaten your lunch. Use these natural breaks to practise pausing for a few moments.
For a fuller pause, go outside where you can stand still, observe nature, look up at the sky, and rest for a few peaceful and connected moments in the soundscape around you.

Guided practice

Find somewhere undisturbed, sit in a comfortable, dignified, and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then play the second practice to explore and experience intentionally pausing, shifting from agitation, noise, and limitation to calm, still awareness.

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Five steps to mindfulness

Every night we close our eyes and let go of everyday conscious awareness when we sleep. And every morning we wake with fully formed thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, sounds, and images that make sense to us. This process, which we experience every day of our lives, is one of those mundane, yet extraordinary things that we hardly ever think about and often take for granted.

Most experts agree that consciousness has two modes: foreground content and background awareness. Examples of foreground content are the words on a page, an image, a thought, a sound, or something that is being said. Background awareness is the conscious space that these flow through.

Like swirling particles in a shaken snow globe, our attention gets bound to the content of consciousness and caught up in its energy and momentum. And like fish, who apparently are not aware that they’re in the water, we’re often blind to the broader background of awareness. Although it’s possible to be aware of both, without knowing this distinction, we tend to experience these two modes as the same, as we focus almost exclusively on the content. Given that the evolutionary advantage of humans comes from our amazing ability to understand, represent, process, and communicate things and events in the world, our focus on content is not surprising. For instance, as hunter-gatherers, we would have told others in the group where we found the ripe fruit.

Apart from when we’re asleep, conscious awareness is there all the time in the background, whether we notice it or not. The difference is that the content of consciousness comes and goes. For instance. a thought about something we need to do arises, is noticed, and then dissolves. What’s interesting is that when we are lost in thought, we lose awareness of the here-and-now of background awareness and enter a conceptual world of content. So, we become much less aware of our bodies and senses.

Mindfulness is fundamentally about improving our attention and awareness; knowing where our attention is at any moment and being consciously aware of the broader background of experience. This allows us to notice when we drift off in thought as well as to become more familiar with the background of our experience through our body and senses.

Improving our awareness of when our mind wanders is difficult, as it’s almost impossible to notice the transition. One moment we’re happily walking along, fully aware of sounds, sensations, and the movement of the body, and within a beat, we’ve drifted off in thought replaying that embarrassing event at the weekend. This is something we’re all familiar with. One explanation of why noticing the transition is so difficult is that the brain automatically switches into automatic mode when our awareness drops, and then it works on whatever is going on for us just below conscious awareness and takes our attention with it.

Here are five fundamental steps that underpin mindfulness practice that we’ll return to again and again:

Noticing that your awareness has dropped and that your attention is now engaged in unintentional and automatic thoughts.
Acknowledging where your attention has gone, then gently disengaging from the automatic thoughts.
Anchoring yourself back into the present by connecting with your breath, body, and senses.
Settling in the open, aware space outside of content and movement.
Then responding to whatever arises in the moment with open awareness, flexibility, and kindness.

You can use this process informally during the day to bring yourself back to a mindful and aware state. These steps are also a useful part of formal mindfulness practice. For instance, this could be 10, 15, or 30-minute sitting practice, where you first settle your mind and emotions, bring your attention and awareness to your body and senses and then work with whatever arises in your experience with the five steps. And whenever your attention drifts, start with step one again. Beginning again as many times as it takes.

As humans, we have evolved with a mind that is so powerful that it takes over without asking permission. Mindfulness practice is about exploring and investigating what is going on in our experience, so that, as far as we can, we become masters of our mind and attention, rather than its servant.

Suggested weekly practice

Remember to notice when your mind wanders during the week, with kindness and curiosity. When you find your mind wandering, acknowledge where your attention has gone and gently bring it back to your body and senses, which are only ever in the present moment.
When you acknowledge where your attention and gone, try labelling thoughts. Some suggestions are “useful or not useful”, “future, past or present”, “nurturing or depleting”, or “expanding or limiting”. This is almost like gardening for the mind; weeding out thoughts that no longer serve you.
Explore and investigate these two modes of consciousness; the content of consciousness and conscious awareness and see what insights emerge. Do you lose contact with your body and senses when you drift off in thought? Is it possible to rest in conscious awareness without having your attention grabbed by thoughts or sounds?

Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified, and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps
Then play the second audio to explore the five-step practice.

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