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

changing the chair you normally sit on at meetings. You’ll be asked to dothese tasks mindfully, with your full attention. This may sound frivolous, but these things can be very effective at breaking down the habits that can trap you in negative ways of thinking. Habit Releasers snap you out of a rut and can give you new avenues of life to explore. You’ll be asked to carry out one each week.
     
    Each meditation practice should, ideally, be carried out on six days out of seven. If, for whatever reason, you can’t manage six sessions in any given week, you can simply roll over the practice and carry it out for a further week. Alternatively, if you’ve only missed a few sessions you can move on to the next week’s practice. The choice will be left up to you. It is not essential that you carry out the course in eight weeks, but it
is
important that you complete the program if you want to gain the maximum benefit and fully taste what mindfulness might offer you.
     
    For clarity, in each chapter we have highlighted the “practices of the week” in a separate box. This makes it easy for you to read the whole book before embarking on the eight-week program should you choose to do so. If you take this approach, it would then be best if you reread the appropriate chapter when it’s time for you to carry out the allotted meditation, so you can understand the aims and intentions of each practice.
     
    For the first four weeks of the program, the emphasis is on learning to pay open-hearted attention to different aspects of the internal and external world. You’ll also learn how to use the “Three-Minute Breathing Space” meditation (see p. 130 ) to ground yourself through the day, or whenever you feel that life is running away with you. It helps to consolidate the things that you learn during the longer formal practices. Many of those around the world who’ve completed our mindfulness courses say that it’s the most important skill they’ve ever learned for regaining control over their lives.
     

A week-by-week summary of the program
    ----
    Week One helps you to see the automatic pilot at work and encourages you to explore what happens when you “wake up.” Central to this week is a
Body and Breath
meditation that stabilizes the mind and helps you to see what unfolds when you focus your full awareness on just one thing at a time. Another shorter meditation helps you to reconnect with your senses through mindful eating. Although both practices are very simple, they also provide the essential foundations on which all the other meditations are built.
     
    Week Two uses a simple
Body Scan
meditation to help explore the difference between
thinking
about a sensation and
experiencing
it. Many of us spend so much of our time living “in our heads” that we almost forget about the world experienced directly through our senses. The Body Scan meditation helps to train your mind so that you can focus your attention directly on your bodily sensations without judging or analyzing what you find. This helps you to see, ever more clearly, when the mind has begun to wander away by itself, so that you gradually learn to “taste” the difference between the “thinking mind” and the “sensing mind.”
     
    Week Three builds on the previous sessions with some nonstrenuous Mindful Movement practices based on yoga. The movements, even though they are not difficult in themselves, allow you to see more clearly what your mental and physical limits are, and how you react when you reach them. They help the mind to continue the process of reintegrating with the body. You’ll gradually learn that the body is exquisitely sensitive to emerging unsettling feelings when you are becoming too goal-focused—and this allows you to see how tense, angry or unhappy you become when things don’t turn out the way you want. It’s an early warning system ofprofound power and significance that allows you to head off problems before they gain unstoppable