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

momentum.
     
    Week Four introduces a
Sounds and Thoughts
meditation that progressively reveals how you can be sucked unwittingly into “overthinking.” You’ll learn to see your thoughts as mental events that come and go just like sounds. By meditating on the sounds around you, you’ll come to learn that “the mind is to thought what the ear is to sound.” This helps you to take a “decentered” stance to your thoughts and feelings, seeing them come and go in the space of awareness. This will enhance clarity of awareness and encourage you to take a different perspective on your busyness and troubles.
     
    Week Five introduces a meditation—
Exploring Difficulty
—that helps you to face (rather than avoid) the difficulties that arise in your life from time to time. Many of life’s problems can be left to resolve themselves, but some need to be faced with a spirit of openness, curiosity and compassion. If you don’t embrace such difficulties, then they can increasingly blight your life.
     
    Week Six develops this process even further, exploring how negative ways of thinking gradually dissipate when you actively cultivate loving-kindness and compassion through a
Befriending Meditation
and acts of generosity in daily life. Cultivating friendship towards yourself, including for what you see as your “failures” and “inadequacies,” is the cornerstone of finding peace in a frantic world.
     
    Week Seven explores the close connection between our daily routines, activities, behavior and moods. When we are stressed and exhausted, we often give up the things that “nourish” us to make time for the more “pressing” and “important” things. We try toclear the decks. Week Seven focuses on using meditation to help you make increasingly skillful choices, so that you can do more of the things that nourish you, and limit the downsides of those things that drain and deplete your inner resources. This will help you to enter a virtuous circle that leads to greater creativity, resilience and the ability to enjoy life spontaneously as it is, rather than how you wish it to be. Anxieties, stresses and worries will still come, but they are more likely to melt away as you learn to meet them with kindness.
     
    Week Eight helps you to weave mindfulness into your daily life, so that it’s always there when you need it the most.
     
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    The remaining four weeks of the program build on this work, giving you more practical ways to see thoughts as mental events—like clouds in the sky—and helping you to cultivate an attitude of acceptance, compassion and empathy toward yourself and others. And, from this state of mind, all else follows.
     
    During the eight weeks of the program we deliberately place each dimension of the mindful Being mode (outlined in Chapter Three) in the foreground, so that you learn progressively, at the deepest of levels, what happens when you wake up to your life. Although it seems as if each week is teaching a different aspect of mindfulness, they are, in fact, all interrelated. As we said on p. 44 , a shift in one dimension brings about a shift in the others as well. This is why you will be invited to do many different practices and to persist with each one for at least a week—for each of them provides a different gateway into awareness, andno one can say which, for you, at this point in your life, will be most helpful in helping you reconnect with what is deepest and wisest within you.
     

Habit Releasers
     
    The Habit Releasers you’ll be asked to carry out each week are based on beautifully simple practices that, as their name suggests, break down the habits that can trap you in negative ways of thinking. They snap you out of your old careworn ruts and give you exciting new avenues to explore. They exploit another understanding that you’ll gain from meditation—that it’s difficult to be curious and unhappy at the same time. Reigniting your innate human curiosity is a wonderful way