Asking questions leads to change.
Inquiry is the ignition key – if we’re stimulated to wonder and ask questions, we give ourselves a moment to pause and reflect. If we do not inquire, then we have no impetus to do anything differently or to learn. If we don’t learn, we won’t change.
META-AWARENESS
When we do Mind Time practices, we deliberately (but gently and kindly) bring attention to our present-moment experience. Then our minds wander. Then we notice that wandering and we bring our focus back to our present-moment experience. In this way, we are exercising the parts of our brain involved in observing and describing experience, as well as those involved in focus and attention. In doing so, we build our capacity to do this to a degree that allows us to call these brain networks into action when we need them most in our daily lives.
This sort of awareness is different to simply having a general sense of understanding. The sort of awareness we are talking about is meta-awareness. As we saw earlier, ‘meta’ means ‘beyond’ or ‘at a higher level’. So we are pointing towards a specific type of awareness. It describes a particular way of observing and being able to describe what is happening in the ever-changing stream of your experience from moment to moment.
This can be a tricky idea to grasp, although it will become clearer when you actually try out any of the Mind Time practices.
Sometimes the stream of our experience is calm and steady; sometimes it’s much more turbulent. We can think of it as made up of four elements – our thoughts, feelings, body sensations and impulses. These combine and recombine in all sorts of unpredictable ways.
The stream of our experience – our thoughts, feelings, body sensations and impulses – is always flowing, always changing, from the day we’re born until the day we die. And here’s the point: we can be immersed in that stream – just experiencing. Or, at key times, we can notice the stream. We can see what’s going on with us. In that moment, meta-awareness occurs and something new and subtly powerful enters the picture.
Meta-awareness enables us to choose.
When we are aware of our thoughts, feelings, body sensations or impulses as just that – as just a thought, just a feeling, just a sensation or just an impulse – a new freedom can enter the picture.
We can think of meta-awareness as a wonderful capacity that allows us to do two seemingly contradictory things at once. On the one hand, we’re still in the stream of our experience because we can’t ever leave that stream. So long as we’re alive, we’re experiencing. But meta-awareness allows us at one and the same time to step for a moment onto the bank of the stream and to see it flowing by.
With meta-awareness, we’re both in the stream and ever so slightly apart from it – objectively observing it, noticing what’s going on.
Imagine you are on a tall-masted ship – one with big sails and a crew of 50 hard at work on the deck. You hit a storm. You cling on to the side, unable to move. Meta-awareness is the ability to climb up into the crow’s nest. You are still on the ship – you are intimately aware of how the lurching of the ship makes you feel; you feel the wind rush at your face – you are very much in the experience. But, crucially, you are also ever so slightly distant from it now and able to look down on the rest of the crew, able to see the storm and how it is affecting the ship. You can see the bigger picture.
Peter is a quiet, introverted single father. He took up the Mind Time practices we shared with him partly because he was experiencing quite high levels of anxiety as he tried to manage commitments of work, being a father and also a carer to an elderly parent. For him, it was developing his ability to observe his thoughts rather than be ruled by them that made a crucial difference. He explained:
‘The practices gave me a way to take back control over my own thinking. So recognising that I’m choosing my thoughts, and they’re not me, they’re just the noise of what’s going on.’
To get a more immediate experience of what we’re talking about, try this experiment.
We’ll briefly outline two different scenarios and invite you to reflect on each of them, separately, for a few seconds. If the contents of these scenarios don’t work in your own life, when you’ve read them both maybe take a moment to imagine something that better fits your circumstances.
Scenario 1
You’ve had a dreadful night. At 3 a.m. you woke suddenly with a low-level feeling of anxiety – and that got you thinking. You know that it’s not helpful to pursue thoughts like that at 3 a.m. – they’re always somehow exaggerated – but you couldn’t help yourself. One thought led to another. To top it off, you then started worrying about the fact that you weren’t sleeping and you were going to be tired and significantly below your best for the busy day ahead. So you started to think about that, and that really didn’t help. Having finally dropped off at 5.30, the alarm woke you at 6.30 and you began your morning bleary-eyed and feeling like there was sand under your eyelids.
That morning, you drop the kids off at school and they leave the car without saying a word to you.
What do you think? How do you feel?
Reflect on that for a few seconds before reading Scenario 2.
Scenario 2
You’ve had a great night. One of those really comfortable, satisfying nights when you get to bed at a good time, sleep all the way through and wake having had what feels like the perfect amount of sleep. You feel good.
That morning, you drop the kids off at school and they leave the car without saying a word to you.
What do you think? How do you feel?
Now we have just one question for you. Between Scenario 1 and Scenario 2 – was there any difference?
When we talk about these scenarios we usually find that there are a few people who experience no difference between the two. But there will also be a significant number of people who experience the two scenarios very differently.
‘In the first scenario I was so irritated,’ someone might say. ‘I thought, “Oh yeah – that’s right, I’m just your taxi service …” but in the second scenario I experienced that in another way. “Ah well,” I thought, “teenagers …”.’
It’s exactly the same event – the kids leave the car without speaking – but in one mind state you interpret that one way, in another mind state you have an alternative interpretation.
The way your mind is shaped by the first scenario presents you with a world in which your kids don’t care and treat you like a taxi service. In the second scenario, a differently shaped mind presents you with a world where, hey, your kids are just teenagers with their own preoccupations and, while this behaviour is something you’ll maybe raise with them another time, for now it’s OK. It doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t care.
What’s going on here?
With challenging events we assume that the way we think and feel is caused by that event. ‘Of course I feel irritated. Didn’t you see how they just walked off without acknowledging me?’ But it’s not the event that caused us to react in that way.
In one mind-state we think and feel one way about the event (‘I’m just your taxi service!’); in another mind-state we think and feel differently (‘Ah well – teenagers …’). Not only that. It’s also important to see that the way we think and feel about what happens has further impacts on our mind-state. We get irritated when the kids walk off without saying good-bye and that takes our mind-state a notch or two lower. When we’re in a more positive and resourceful mind-state, and can smile and let go of it, it doesn’t bring us down.
Here’s the point. Sometimes we’re more resourceful; sometimes we’re less. There’s no getting away from that. We’re not about to say that the answer to all our problems is just to be more resourceful more