Why Mindfulness?

How might mindfulness training be helpful for me and my life? Mindfulness teaches us how to pay attention skilfully to our experience, enabling us to unhook from unhelpful thoughts, feeling and behaviour patterns and instead discover space for flexible choices that align with our needs and values. Unfortunately, most of us aren't taught how to pay attention in this way and so we are left to live life on a kind of automatic pilot mode, caught up in the habitual patterns of reactivity that are ingrained in us and which can lead us into unncessary stress and suffering. Mindfulness training is a bit like discovering a manual for the mind - how it works and what we can do to use it wisely.

Why are our thoughts, feelings and behaviour patterns sometimes so unhelpful? The human mind is wired to help us survive - protecting us from threats and taking advantage of opportunities. This works well in emergency situations - so, for example, if you were being chased by a wild animal, your body would produce stress hormones impelling you to start running (or fighting) and your mind would start whirring to find possible solutions to the problem of being attacked. However, this same "driven-doing" mode of mind doesn't work so well when the difficulties it faces are more chronic, or not so easily fixed by running and fighting. In these scenarios, the body and mind still react with stress and rumination, but if there is no quick resolution, we stay anxious with thoughts racing round our heads. Not only that, but because these thoughts and feelings are themselves unpleasant, the mind starts treating them as a threat too, and starts trying to avoid or fight them as well. And because we can't actually avoid our own inner experience, this just ramps up the stress and sense of powerlessness and becomes a vicious cycle.

What does mindfulness training bring to this process? Mindfulness training helps us to see that we don't have to identify with or struggle against our thoughts and feelings. They aren't a threat to be fought off or avoided, but rather are just automatic inner patterns that don't have to dominate us. This means we can let go of fuelling the cycle of avoidance and stress reactivity, and instead discover space for responding to whatever is going on for us wisely, from a place of presence. With this greater sense of spaciousness, we can start to be in more embodied contact with our values and needs, and take action to bring our lives into alignment with them. Once we are no longer caught up in the driven-doing mode of mind, we become more psychologically flexible and are freer to move in the directions we want to go in life.

What does the training actually involve? Mindfulness training is a very practical process of learning how to shift our attention from being caught up in the automatic, conceptual driven-doing mode of mind, and into the actual moment-to-moment experiencing of our lives. This switching of attention - a bit like turning the beam of a torch from one object to another - often means learning how to tune directly into body sensations, as the body is always in the sensory experience of the present moment and provides a useful anchor that isn't caught up in thoughts. It can also mean learning to watch the habitual patterns of the body and mind from a place of awareness, a bit like standing behind a waterfall, noticing but not being caught up in the water rushing past. These mindfulness skills are practised in range of different meditation practices, and by practising them over and over again, we discover that we can let thoughts and feelings happen, without having to automatically react to them.

How can I know that mindfulness training is effective? An extensive body of clinical research over the last 40 years has consistently shown that mindfulness training is helpful for working with a wide range of conditions and life situations, including mental and physical health difficulties (such as depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), fatigue, chronic pain or illness), life transitions, work, family and parenting stresses, neurodiversity and neurodivergence (eg ADHD, autism), addiction and relationship issues. Mindfulness is taught widely in healthcare, education, workplaces and other settings.

Why train with Ed Halliwell from Mindfulness Sussex? Ed is a highly experienced mindfulness teacher and author who has practised meditation for over 25 years and has worked with thousands of people in public groups, workplaces and one-to-one. He has been teaching mindfulness full-time since 2010. Read more about Ed

How long will the training take? A foundational group or one-to-one mindfulness course is usually eight weeks long - and this is often sufficient to enable people to bring these skills to whatever is going on in their lives. However, people frequently find the practices so transformative that they choose to continue the training longer term, and we offer various options to support this. Of course, everyone's circumstances are different so a one-to-one training is flexible and can range from a few sessions to longer term work.