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Richard Gilpin is a counsellor, cognitive behavioural psychotherapist and mindfulness instructor. He has trained extensively in mindfulnessbased practices, has an MA in Buddhist Studies and is co-founder of the Bodhi Garden, a charitable trust. Richard is the author of Mindfulness for Black Dogs and Blue Days.

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Everybody gets anxious. Anxiety principally concerns our relationship with the future – the anticipation of which can provoke disquiet and even dread. The future only exists in the mind, so it is to our mental world that we must turn if we are to alleviate anxiety. This is where our wonderful capacity to be mindful comes in. Mindfulness is principally about our relationship with the present – a ‘being with’ what is happening now, in all its vividness and perplexity. Where mindfulness meets anxiety, then, is in the obscure interzone between ‘now’ and ‘later’.

START WHERE YOU ARE

To mindfully untangle from anxiety is a journey of self-discovery. It involves learning to be intimate with anxiety and finding a release from its grip through the power of affectionate awareness and the practice of skilful responding.

THIS BOOK OFFERS SOME TRIED AND TESTED ways, ancient and modern, for doing just that. It is part road map, part toolkit, part inspiration for the journey. It is not a substitute for the journey itself, which only you can make. Such an inner journey differs from an outer one in one crucial aspect: the path and the destination are not separate. The journey’s means and ends are fused in a dynamic harmony. We drop our driven pursuit of goals and simply start where we are. Every step is the achievement. Working mindfully with anxiety involves tuning in to the immediacy of life – what may be so obvious that we overlook it. The materials we use are the raw data from which we make sense of our world – thoughts, feelings, sensory stimuli... everything, in fact, we call ‘reality’.

The Nature of Anxiety

As a therapist who works regularly with anxiety sufferers, I have become familiar with its distinctive features – its foreboding presence in a person’s life, its unsettling and debilitating effects, its wisplike occupancy of a mind whose thoughts, in contrast, feel like wrecking balls. Anxiety comes in many forms, but what commonly strikes me about it is its ensnaring quality – the way it throws people ‘onto the back foot’, leaving them disorientated and doubtful. Anxiety robs us of our natural spontaneity and our chance to flourish in the world.

I also know about anxiety through personal experience – its visceral grip and tremorous energy, the jagged thinking and vacillating behaviour I fall into, the hellish claustrophobia that comes from feeling suffocated by the future. Because of its bewildering impact, I find anxiety a tricky state to pin down. It can feel so ‘unreal’ at the time that it is difficult to clearly recall afterwards – as if it happened in another world or to someone else. It can, therefore, be a challenging state to be curious about. But when I do get curious, I find this is time and energy well spent.

Curiosity is an essential ingredient for good mindfulness practice. To mindfully investigate anxiety is to turn towards it – to see and feel it intimately. With clear seeing comes understanding. To witness, at first hand, how anxiety conjures itself into existence is to reveal something of its true nature. When I realize the stories my anxious mind tells me about the future are just that – stories – they lose their hold over me. If my anxious thoughts had any validity, I would have wound up, long ago, either dead or destitute. How sweet it is to break free from the fabrications of my deluded mind!

The Reality Check of Mindfulness

Showing a friendly interest in anxiety is, of course, counterintuitive since it is usually something we try to avoid. Here lies the reality check of mindfulness, which invites us to acknowledge the fact of anxiety – its natural place in the scheme of human experience – and to witness how the urge to avoid it is not only unrealistic but can also make matters worse by feeding deep-seated tendencies that maintain subjective distress. Mindfulness practice involves a forthright ‘knowing’ of anxiety – not to get rid of it, or even change it, but to embrace it and let it be. When we learn to let things be, we learn to let them go.

Mindfulness practice involves a forthright ‘knowing’ of anxiety

Learn to let go of anxiety – really let go – and it ceases to be a problem. What was once an interminable blight on one’s life is transformed into empty bursts of sensations and fantastical parades of mental hype dissolving in space. This is possible through the practice of mindfulness – the clear, receptive, even-minded awareness of what is happening as it is happening. Under the steady, non-discriminating floodlights of mindful awareness, anxiety is exposed for what it is. Its illusions of permanency and substantiality are blown apart. It fizzles and fades like a Halloween sparkler. A new relationship with it becomes possible – one where resistance is replaced by acceptance and anguish turns to ease.

VANISHING POINT

For me, writing this book has been an immersion in its subject matter. I remember the first time anxiety, mindfulness and this book all converged at a single point in time. It was a month before I started writing, during a day-long mindfulness retreat.

I HAD BEEN ENJOYING A RESTFUL MORNING of meditation, sharing the silence with a congenial group of people. But, as the retreat progressed, I had become aware of indistinct tensions gathering inside me – a fuzzy tightness in my mind and elusive thoughts that seemed to chisel in the background. Physically, too, I felt ill at ease.

By the afternoon, my edginess had intensified. During a period of walking meditation, I became so disturbed that I could ignore the feelings no longer. Objectively, life seemed good – it was Saturday afternoon, I was doing what I wanted and, outwardly at least, all was serene. The way I felt made no sense. Then I recalled what I was supposed to be doing – practising mindfulness – and noted the ideal circumstances for exploring what was happening within me. So I dropped all my pondering, stood absolutely still, grounded myself through my body, opened up to my feelings and did absolutely nothing. In the stillness and spaciousness of the moments that followed there arose, for the first time, a clear recognition that I was deeply anxious at the prospect of writing this book.

A Dawning Moment

Up until then, I’d thought I was excited about it! I had spent months mulling over the book’s content, making notes and looking forward to a new creative project. But soon it would be time to get down to the hard graft of writing. All the irksome juggling of book work, day job and other responsibilities was imminent. These stressors had been hovering on the horizons of my mind like storm clouds. I’d been playing host to them without even realizing it.

My mind had been doing its ‘early warning’ routine, hence all my uneasiness. Becoming aware of what was bothering me and ‘getting real’ about the future left me free to mentally park the whole lot and appreciate some mindful walking.

FINDING YOUR OWN WAY

Any book on mindfulness can only be a signpost and not the location itself. Mindfulness emphasizes the authority of experience, not of theory or doctrine. The pages ahead are an invitation to experiment with how you might live more mindfully and less anxiously.

READING BOOKS, HOWEVER, IS NOT ENOUGH. Practice is required. ‘Practice’, in mindfulness terms, comprises enquiry, reflection, meditation and action. To aid your efforts, threaded through the book are several traditional meditations and reflective exercises.

To practise the meditations, it is advisable to first record the instructions onto an audio device (leaving a gap of two or three minutes between each instruction) and then play the recording as you meditate. If you have no recording device, ask someone to read the instructions to you. The reflective exercises that indicate using a pen and paper do so for good reason – attempting to do them in your head will undermine your objectivity and induce confusion. Consistent, daily practice, particularly of the meditative variety, will deliver positive change to your life – possibly in ways you never imagined. Mindfulness has a habit of conferring unexpected gifts.

One Step at a Time

Mindfulness is a gradual training. We begin in its shallower waters and progressively go deeper. This book approaches its subject matter in kind. The first chapter is all about getting to know anxiety – its nature, function and impact. The second chapter explores practical steps for dealing with it through mindful enquiry and reflection. The third chapter maps the territory of mindfulness practice in depth. The final chapter delves into the implications of centralizing mindfulness in one’s life. That said, every chapter is complete in itself so, if you prefer, you can dip into this book anywhere. On the path of mindfulness we have to find our own way, so how you apply any knowledge you gain from this book is all that matters. I hope it inspires you to take your practice further.

CHAPTER ONE

STATES OF EMERGENCY

To be anxious is to be alive. Human beings face persistent unknowns and innumerable dangers. Anxiety-free worlds are the stuff of mythical pasts and mythical futures. In our efforts to preserve ourselves amid unpredictability, we are prone to vexation, doubt and fear. This is understandable but it does not mean we have to live in anguish. Exploring the terrain of anxiety helps us get better acquainted with the bare elements of our existence – physical sensations, emotions, thoughts and actions. This marks the beginning of a wise relationship with an essential aspect of the human condition.

THERE MAY BE TROUBLE AHEAD

Life abounds with possibilities. From this rich potential spring the many wonders that are humanity’s birthright. But such potential has a flip side, for unwritten futures also carry with them the risk of unwelcome outcomes. It is within the gap between our sense of a present and our sense of a future – deep in the mystifying flux of what is actual and what is conceivable – that we find the origins of anxiety.

THE WORD ‘ANXIETY’ DERIVES FROM the Latin anxietas, meaning ‘troubled in mind’, which tells us something of the essential nature of this common experience: its tone is disturbing, its footing is mental. A deeper linguistic root is the Greek angho, which translates as ‘to squeeze’. This conveys the feeling of an energy force that exerts pressure and constriction. From this sense of being gripped painfully, angho evolved to mean being ‘burdened’ or ‘weighed down with trouble’.

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.

CONFUCIUS

551–479 BCE, PHILOSOPHER

To be anxious, then, is to find oneself in the stranglehold of mental uneasiness. The mind becomes possessed by vague ideas of things being, or going, wrong. It shrink-wraps life into something that looks and tastes unsavoury. We feel cramped and uptight as a result. The tendency, then, is to behave erratically – to balk, blink, freeze or falter.

Anxiety blurs the boundaries between the real and the imagined. We can get anxious about almost anything: work, ageing, illness, insolvency, our loved ones, environmental catastrophe, nuclear war. The possibility of any one of a multitude of threats, occurring when we least expect it, is readily available to the incredible human mind, which can conjure up any eventuality (and frequently does). Sprinkle in the chance of desired outcomes going unrealized, add the prospect of anything currently going well not lasting, and we succeed in reducing life to an ominous state of affairs. Ouch.

The Fear Factor

Anxiety is part of the territory for any self-aware creature capable of abstract thought. We know this world can be inhospitable and even hostile. We know things can go wrong. When we anticipate impending situations for which we feel ill-equipped, it is natural to go on the alert. This is an attempt to exert control. Anxiety can be understood as an adaptive response to an indefinite number of unfavourable possibilities. It has a survival function – organisms that get anxious when facing potential threats are more likely to carry on living and reproducing. From this perspective, anxiety appears to be a close cousin of another basic human experience: fear.

Fear is our alarm response to danger. It is the appraisal of a perilous event or object that is in our vicinity – either physically near or temporally near. It is marked by physiological arousal (changes in breathing and heart rate) and bodily action (tackling or avoiding the danger). Fear is specific: it is about a particular object or event we perceive to be threatening. When we are fearful, we are focusing on our proximity to what frightens us.

Anxiety requires no specific object or event from which to develop itself. It requires no proximity to threats actual or imagined. Sources of anxiety are often unclear, yet they linger as tensions in the body and loom like ghosts in the mind. At such times, haunted by the unpredictable and uncontrollable aspects of our existence, the difference between fear and anxiety might seem rather academic.

Going Off Piste

Once, lost in the Himalayas, I had a memorable encounter with fear and anxiety. I had gone for an afternoon walk with two friends up a mountain. We had strayed from the main path and got disorientated. In our hunt for a way down, we found only precipitous drops. We were forced further up the mountain, seeking any sign of any path. Then the sun began to drop. In the dimming light, it became too dangerous to continue searching for a track. Ill-equipped for a night at altitude in sub-zero temperatures, we paused to fortify ourselves with some bananas and consider our situation.

When I heard the concern in my friends’ voices, the icy chill of fear bit into me. My chest felt like a lead weight. My throat was tight and dry. My mind flooded with the real possibilities of being lost for days, getting attacked by wild animals or freezing to death. Such was the hijacking power of my fears, I was struck dumb for some time, unable to contribute to a very practical discussion my friends were having about what to do next.

Peak Moments

After some minutes, the physical tension eased and my breathing softened. I found my voice enough to agree to a bold plan of scaling several hundred metres upwards to a tree-lined hilltop, which appeared to be our best chance of finding shelter for the night. On that crown of dry earth canopied by two pine trees, we found enough twigs, branches and, crucially, an old tree stump to maintain a fire that burned until dawn.

Between us, we had snack food, some mint leaf, two mugs, a stainless steel bowl and Swiss Army knives. We spent the night tending the fire, boiling down snow to make mint tea and huddling together, sometimes telling stories, often falling silent, humbled by the immensity of the landscape. Perched on rock, enclosed by snow, sustained by fire, nourished by air (and tea), it was a profoundly elemental experience. The morning sun rising over a line of Himalayan snow peaks is one of the most awe-inspiring things I have ever seen.

My fear had long dissolved, but my anxiety loitered throughout the night and into my descent from the mountain the next morning. I kept brooding on the fragility of my situation and the endless potential for dangers to arise. I felt butterflies in my stomach every time I fell captive to the currents of unnerving ‘What if?’ thoughts trickling through my head. My mind seemed drawn like a magnet to jumbles of undefined calamities. My body pulsed as if on perpetual ‘amber alert’. I only eased up once off the mountain.

It is the nature of anxiety to hover indeterminately, to take up headspace, induce tension, and edge out the joys of life’s adventures. It is the nature of humans to get anxious. But being anxious does not have to be distressing or arduous.

EXCITEMENT WITHOUT OXYGEN

Many people associate anxiety with unpleasant bodily symptoms such as tension and impaired breathing and, therefore, try to avoid it. Perhaps you are reading this book because you want to find ways to stop feeling anxious or reduce its occurrence in your life.

THIS IS UNDERSTANDABLE