Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World by Mark Williams, Danny Penman

difficult states of mind. Mindfulness does not say “don’t worry” or “don’t be sad.” Instead it acknowledges your fear and your sadness, your fatigue and exhaustion, and encourages you to “turn toward” these feelings and whatever emotions are threatening to engulf you. This compassionate approach gradually dissipates the power of your negative feelings.
     

6. Mental time travel versus remaining in the present moment
     
    Both your memory and your ability to plan for the future are critical to the smooth running of your daily life, but they are also biased by your prevailing moods. When you are under stress, you tend to remember only the bad things that have happened to you and find it difficult to recall the good. A similar thing happens when you think about the future: stress makes you think that disaster is just around the corner, and when you feel unhappy or a creeping sense of hopelessness, you find it almost impossible to look to the future with optimism. By the time these feelings have bubbled through to your conscious mind, you’re no longer aware that they are merely memories of the past or plans for the future, but have instead become lost in mental time travel.
     
    We
re-live
past events and
re-feel
their pain, and we
pre-live
future disasters and so
pre-feel
their impact.
     
    Meditation trains the mind so that you consciously “see” your own thoughts as they occur, so that you can live your life as it unfolds in the present moment. This does not mean thatyou are imprisoned in the present. You can still remember the past and plan for the future, but Being mode allows you to see them for what they are. You see memory
as
memory and planning
as
planning. Consciously knowing that you are remembering, and knowing that you are planning, helps free you from being a slave to mental time travel. You are able to avoid the extra pain that comes through re-living the past and pre-living the future.
     

7. Depleting versus nourishing activities
     
    When you’re locked into Doing mode, it’s not just the autopilot that drives you—you also tend to get caught up in important career and life goals, and such demanding projects as homemaking, childcare and looking after elderly relatives. These goals are often worthwhile in themselves, but because they can be so demanding it’s tempting to focus on them to the exclusion of everything else, including your own health and well-being. At first, you might tell yourself that such busyness is temporary and that you are, therefore, quite willing to forego the hobbies and pastimes that nourish your soul. But giving these things up can gradually deplete your inner resources and, eventually, leave you feeling drained, listless and exhausted.
     
    Being mode restores the balance by helping you sense more clearly the things that nourish you and those that deplete your inner resources. It helps you sense the need for time to nourish your soul and gives you the space and courage to do so. It also helps you deal more skillfully with those unavoidable aspects of life that can drain away your energy and innate happiness
.
     

Consciously shifting gear
     
    Mindfulness meditation progressively teaches you to sense the seven dimensions (as these points are known) outlined above and, in so doing, it helps you to recognize which mode your mind is operating in. It acts like a gentle alarm bell that tells you, for example, when you are overthinking and reminds you that there is an alternative: that you still have choices, no matter how unhappy, stressed or frantic you might feel. For example, if you sense that you are tying yourself in knots with overthinking and judgmentalism, mindfulness helps you to become more accepting and allows you to approach your difficulty with a sense of warmth and curiosity.
     
    Now we can let you into a secret: if you shift along
any
one of these dimensions, the others shift as well. For example, during the mindfulness program you can practice