Week 4 - Working with difficult experiences
This week we’re focusing on understanding the importance of turning towards, and being with the unpleasant, stressful, unwanted aspects of our lives, without reacting to them.
Key concepts we touch on this week are:
“charged” thoughts
accepting difficult experiences
the paradox of mindfulness
Home practice - week 4
Mindfulness of breathing (from week 2) once a day + body scan (from week 1) once a day.
I’d like to invite you to try out a couple of specific meditations twice during the week: Being with Unwanted Experience & Mindfulness of Breathing – working with charged thoughts. These two additional practices from The Little Mindfulness Workbook can really help support your practice of working with charged thoughts or difficulty in any of your other meditations, as well as being great practices in their own right.
This week’s Mindfulness in Action practice is to accept a difficult experience.
This exercise in accepting a difficult experience is an inner practice. It is about noticing and turning towards your sensations, feelings and emotions. It can only be practiced when you feel safe and can be with what arises.
This practice is not a suggestion to place yourself or stay in an unpleasant or unsafe external situation.Next time you find yourself in a stressful, unpleasant or difficult situation, first of all, simply notice that it's happening and that it's unpleasant. Where do you feel the unpleasantness? In your head, stomach, chest, arms or legs? Somewhere else? See if you can be with the unpleasant sensations without reacting.
Acknowledge that it's difficult, that it's an experience of suffering. You might even say to yourself “This is hard” or “This is a moment of suffering.” Try not to beat yourself up about it, but instead treat yourself as you would a friend who is having a hard time. Kindly, considerately, gently. After all, you're doing something difficult.
Using the breath can help. Take your attention to it, especially as you feel it lower down in your body. Feel your abdomen swelling and subsiding. You can imagine breathing into the unpleasant experience and, on the out breath see if you can let go of your resistance to what is happening.
See if you can allow the difficult situation to simply be there, just as it is, without you needing to do anything about it. See if you can hold it in your attention, in a soft, gentle, calm way. Breathing in the experience, breathing out the resistance. Breathing in the discomfort, breathing out kindness to yourself.
Enjoy your practice!
Acceptance
We have practiced and building up our noticing in the last three weeks. Now we can start practicing turning towards what is. As long as we resist, are in denial, or push away what is here now, we continue to be stuck, without a helpful way of moving on. As we turn towards and BE with what is present here and now, we free up possibilities and we open up to choice. We open up to more creative and compassionate choices.
Acceptance is not weakness, and it requires the attitudes of curiosity (to explore what is really going on) and kindness (towards ourselves).
The paradox of mindfulness
When we are unwilling or unable to be with a difficult or unpleasant experience, we tend to focus all our energy and attention on wanting to change our experience. That never seems to work and the grass remains greener on the other side.
If, however, we turn towards our difficulty or unpleasantness, accepting what is and being with it, with kind curiosity, we find that what we were striving for - paradoxically - starts to happen and becomes our reality. This is what our mindfulness practice is helping us create: being with things and situations as they are, not as we wish / hope / desire them to be.
Optional activities
In The Little Mindfulness Workbook :
you can review the key concepts from our live session by reading chapter 5 of the book.
you can download journal templates that accompany the workbook for being with an unwanted experience and working with a charged thought.
Reflect on your practice and learning: notice what your experience is, jot down some notes in a journal, or share some reflections in the FB group to help your learning.
Poem
Beannacht / Blessing
On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
~ By John O'Donohue from Echoes of Memory
