Get Some Headspace: 10 minutes can make all the difference (9 page)

I won’t pretend that this process was quick, or easy, and nor did it mark the end of me feeling unpleasant emotions. But the experience taught me some lessons. One of the most important was that the emotion itself is often not the problem. It’s the way we react to it that causes the problem. For example, I feel angry and respond to it with more anger, stoking the coals, keeping the fire of anger burning. Or I feel worried and I start to feel worried that I feel worried. By stepping back and getting a little bit of perspective (something I could never have done without meditation) I was able to see the original emotion for what it was. And by simply being aware of it, it was as if it had its moment in the sun and was more willing to move on. So often we shut down when unpleasant feelings arise, we don’t want to feel them or be around them. But by reacting in this way we only give the emotion a greater sense of importance.

By learning to let emotions come and go, and because there’s this underlying sense of awareness and perspective, then no matter how difficult the feeling, there is always the sense that everything is OK, even if the emotion is very strong. The other lesson I learned was that sometimes, the ‘idea’ of something can be very different from reality. I thought I felt very sad, but when I tried to locate that sadness, all I could find were these ever-changing thoughts and physical sensations. I struggled to find any permanent emotion. I just found thoughts and physical sensations that were coloured by the feeling.

Often we’re simply unaware of our feelings. Sure, we notice them when they’re raging out of control, at either end of the spectrum, but the rest of the time it’s as though they’re just there in the background colouring our view of life. But also the speed at which our emotions change, one feeling morphing into the next, can make them seem impossible to separate and define. Think back to the last time you felt happy, do you remember when it began? Take a minute or so to see if you can pinpoint the very moment the emotion of happiness came into being. And then when did it end? What about the last time you felt angry? You might remember the situation or context for the anger, but can you remember when the feeling of anger began and when it finished? And what caused these emotions to suddenly vanish? Was it that they ran out of steam? Did something else more important grab your attention? Or was it simply replaced by the next feeling?

For something that’s so central to our entire experience of life, we have remarkably little understanding of emotions. Neuroscientists can tell us with amazing accuracy what’s happening physiologically, and behavioural scientists can interpret that data to give us a rational explanation for why we feel the way we do. But although this is helpful and interesting, does it change the way you feel? More importantly, does it alter the way you respond or react to the way you feel? I may know that I shouldn’t get angry because it releases harmful chemicals into my body and causes my blood pressure to rise, but that knowledge does little to stop me getting angry. Likewise, I know that taking it easy and being a bit more carefree will make me feel less stressed, but that is of little use if I’m going out of my mind with worry. Sometimes this gap between what we understand intellectually, and our actual experience of emotions in everyday life, can appear as an enormous chasm.

Just as my teacher asked me to consider a life without emotions, good or bad, can you truly say you’d want to live without emotion? The way we feel is fundamental to our experience of life. Perhaps in those moments when we’re overcome by a difficult emotion we might wish that there was some way to get rid of all of them, but this is usually fleeting.

People often begin learning meditation either trying hard to get
rid
of emotions, or fearful that meditation might turn them into some kind of disinterested grey blob, with no sense of emotion whatsoever. But as we’ve seen, this isn’t the case at all.

Emotions affect our perception of people, of situations and the environment in which we live. As a direct consequence, they also affect our
relationships
with people, situations and the environment in which we live. Emotions are the filter between ‘us’ and the ‘world’.

When we feel angry the world can look very threatening: we see situations as obstacles and other people as enemies. And yet when we feel happy, the world can appear as quite a friendly place. We view the same situations as opportunities and the same people as friends. The world around us has not changed that much, but our experience of that world is radically different.

When I think of this idea of a filter I’m reminded of my favourite place to go on holiday. It’s a rugged place, next to the sea, where the forces of nature are strong and the weather changes often. From the chair where I like to sit, I can see an enormous ridge of rock that towers above the village and the beach and stretches out into the ocean. On a clear sunny day these cliffs look spectacular. They appear deep red in colour and have a sense of majesty about them. Even from a distance it’s possible to make out every small detail. On a day like this the rock is truly awe-inspiring. But when it’s a little more cloudy, the appearance of the rock changes frequently throughout the day. Sometimes it looks dull, almost a matt brown in colour, as the shadow of the clouds linger. At other times it seems to take on a yellow, sulphurous tinge. If the clouds are quite dark it can even appear green. Sometimes, on a really stormy day, the cliffs take on a whole different quality altogether. They look almost black in colour and the sharp angles along the top of the ridge seem to carve their way in the sky. On days like this the rock appears imposing, even menacing, in nature. Just as before, the ‘rock’ has not changed in any way, it’s simply that the clouds that pass overhead create the illusion that the rock is somehow different. In the same way, the filter of emotion creates the illusion of how our world looks at any one time.

But there’s another aspect of emotion which differentiates a fleeting experience of happiness or sadness, for example, from a more ingrained, habitual feeling of happiness or sadness. In the context of meditation this is sometimes discussed in terms of ‘traits’ and ‘states’.

Traits are those emotions that seem to define a character. It might be ‘cheerful Amy’ or ‘moody Mark’. These traits can reflect our upbringing, social conditioning, and the experiences that have shaped us along the way. It’s as if they are part of our genetic code and they tend to feel very ‘set’ in nature. Because of this, many people are not even that aware of their own traits.

Take a moment to think what your traits might be. You might consider what your view of life is like. Does it feel as though life is working
with
you or
against
you? Does life feel like a
pleasure
or a
chore
? For meditation to be effective, it doesn’t matter which it is – although you may well find the former a considerably more enjoyable way to live. And what about your friends, family and work colleagues? I’m sure you can think of people at either end of the ‘perspective scale’. At one end you’ll have the person who’s capable of putting a negative spin on just about anything – winning the Lottery, finding love, getting a promotion. They might get very angry sometimes, or simply moan and grumble their way through life. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who appear so overwhelmingly cheery that you find yourself asking ‘Is this person for real?’ Of course, sometimes they’re not ‘for real’, but there are undoubtedly some people who seem naturally happy and content in life. So these emotions can be compared to character traits.

‘States’ however refer to those fleeting emotions that come and go in everyday life. Perhaps someone says something unpleasant to you, your child takes their first steps, or you get some bad news. These things are likely to be met with the appropriate emotion that will come and then go again, they are the ‘ups and downs’ of life. You might experience a burst of anger at a driver on the road, but before you’ve had a chance to indulge the story, something on the radio has grabbed your attention and you find yourself laughing, the anger forgotten. Or it might be something more serious, perhaps a long period of depression after losing your job, which seems to hang around for some time before leaving. Either way, the fact that the feeling comes and goes in this way indicates that they are temporary ‘states’, as opposed to ‘traits’. Sometimes our emotional states can become so ingrained, they start to feel like traits. It’s as if the emotion is so overwhelming that we can’t see past it. And in these situations the emotion can even begin to define who we are. Depression is a good example of this. So while at times the two can feel inseparable, it’s useful to be aware of the difference.

Having experimented with a number of different meditation techniques over the years, I still feel that the clearest, simplest and most widely accessible approach to emotions is the same approach that we discussed in relation to thought. After all, it’s very difficult to separate thought and feeling. Do your thoughts define the way you feel? Or does the way you feel define your thoughts? Mindfulness is the willingness to rest in that natural state of awareness, resisting the temptation to judge whatever emotion comes up, and therefore neither opposing or getting carried away with a feeling. Meditation is simply the exercise that is going to give you the best conditions to practise being mindful of these emotions. And headspace is the result of applying this approach. Headspace does not mean being
free
from emotions, but rather existing in a place where you are at ease with whatever emotion is present.

In the same way that we defined thoughts as neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’, we’re going to do the same with feelings. Now this idea is usually met with ‘What the . . . ? How can you tell me that anger’s not bad? I just shouted at someone, surely that has to be bad? And it feels horrible. When I’m angry I feel like I want to explode! What’s “good” about anger?’ Well, of course the consequences of anger are a very different matter and it’s important to exercise restraint, but in the context of this exercise it helps to adopt an open mind, one that is curious and interested in the nature of the emotion itself, rather than simply labelling the emotion as good or bad through past experience. Otherwise we’re left with the same old attitude of chasing after ‘positive’ emotions and trying to get rid of all the ‘negative’ ones. Only you can say how well that approach has worked for you so far.

So we come back to the idea of gentle curiosity: watching, observing and noticing what happens in the body and mind as these emotions come and go. Remember, the objective here is headspace, a sense of ease with whatever emotion is present. It means to sit on the roadside, watching the emotions pass, neither getting drawn into them because they look inviting, nor running away from them because they look frightening. The technique is not about trying to stop
emotions
from arising, in the same way that it’s not about trying to stop
thoughts
from arising. Like thoughts, emotions spontaneously arise. It’s how we meet these emotions, how we respond to them that is important.

When approaching emotions through meditation, it’s not that we need to give the emotions more importance (they already receive quite enough attention); instead, we need to find a way to relate to them in a more skilful way. We need to find a way to be aware of our emotions, to experience, acknowledge and live with them, and yet not be at their mercy. Mindfulness and meditation show us how best to do this.

At an intellectual level, we can also appreciate the value of so-called negative emotions. I often hear people say that were it not for a particularly difficult period in their life, they would never have gone on and done the things they’ve done – and that even if they could go back and change it, they wouldn’t. With the passing of time and with increased perspective, the experience of emotion can look very different.

It’s the nature of life for stuff to happen. And when it happens it can be good to know that you’re as well equipped as you can be to deal with the situation. This doesn’t mean that you won’t experience the feeling, because undoubtedly you will. But what it
does
mean is that the way in which you relate to the feeling will enable you to let go of it more quickly and more easily.

When I first heard that meditation was simply a snapshot of my everyday mind I found it hard to believe. I’d never experienced my mind with quite so much awareness and so I’d never seen it that way before. On the one hand, there was a familiarity to it all, but on the other it was not what I was expecting at all. You may have already got a sense of this with your own mind, even from just those few short exercises I’ve outlined. When we meet something new or unexpected, we tend to react to it in a different way to those things that are familiar. Some react with excitement and wonder, others approach it with a sense of anxiety or trepidation. The same is true when it comes to watching the mind.