Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World Read Online Free PDF

repeatedly found out for himself, most of the time such “angst-ridden maunderings” soon blow over. Something catches our eye and makes us smile—a friend calls and cheers us up or perhaps we’ll watch a movie and go to bed early with a cup of hot chocolate. Virtually every time we’re buffeted by life’s ill winds, something crops up to redress the balance. But it’s not always this way. Sometimes the weight of our own history intervenes to whip up an emotional squall because our memories can have a powerful impact on our thoughts, feelings, drives and, ultimately, our bodies too.
     
    Take the case of Lucy. Although she describes herself as being“driven” and “mostly successful” she’s acutely aware that something fundamental is missing from her life. She’s achieved most of what she wanted, so finds it perplexing that she’s not happy, contented and at peace with herself. She constantly tells herself, “I should be happy,” as if saying this alone is enough to drive away unhappiness.
     
    Lucy’s bouts of unhappiness began when she was a teenager. Her parents split up when she was seventeen and the family home was sold, forcing both parents to move into apartments that were barely adequate. Lucy surprised herself, and her family, by toughing it out. Sure, she was initially devastated by her parents’ divorce, but she soon learned to distract herself by working hard at school. This was her life-saver. She achieved good grades, went to college and got a decent diploma. She surprised herself again when she got her first job as a trainee buyer for an international clothing chain. She then spent most of her twenties climbing the promotion ladder until she was managing a small team of buyers.
     
    Work gradually took over Lucy’s life, leaving her with less and less time for herself. It happened so slowly that she hardly realized that life had begun passing her by. There were high points too, of course, like her marriage to Tom and the birth of their two daughters. She loved them all to bits, but she still couldn’t quite shake the feeling that life was something that only happened to other people. She was walking “through slowly thickening syrup,” she told us.
     
    This “thickening syrup” was her current busyness and stress, together with the older patterns of thoughts and feelings from the past. Even though Lucy was outwardly successful, her thoughts were often dogged—deep down—by fears of failure. This ensured that when an entirely normal low mood appeared,her mind would spontaneously begin digging up memories of when she felt similarly in the past, while a harsh “inner critic” told her that it would be shameful to display any weaknesses. Vague feelings of fear or insecurity ended up triggering a cascade of painful feelings from the past that felt very real and visceral, and that quickly took on a life of their own, activating another wave of negative emotions. On the surface, these seemed to have little connection with each other; however, these emotions
were
connected because such feelings often come in constellations, with one part of a pattern triggering the rest.
     
    As Lucy will testify, we rarely experience tension or sadness on their own—anger, irritability, bitterness, jealousy and hatred can all be bound up with them in an uncomfortable, spiky knot of pain. These feelings may be directed at others but, more often than not, they are aimed at ourselves, even if we’re not consciously aware of it. Over a lifetime, these emotional constellations can become ever more closely coupled to thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and even behavior. This is how the past can have an all-pervading effect in the present; if we trip one emotional switch, the others can follow behind (and likewise with bodily sensations such as an ache or a pain). All of these can trigger habitual patterns of thinking, behaving and feeling that we know are counterproductive, but somehow just can’t seem to