I recently had the delight of attending the Deeper Mindfulness teacher training by Mark Williams, hosted by The Mindfulness Network. I planned to do this training in 2023, but events conspired against it. I did the practitioner course two years ago as a preparation, and read the book. So the concepts had infused for quite some time, and I had already started to use some of them in my teaching.
Having done the training and reread the book, some things have really come to the fore for me; some of them I implicitly understood, but had not seen so starkly. For a long time, for me, meditation and mindfulness had become not a means to escape the disturbing challenges of life, but a way of navigating an uncertain world and making better choices. Most of the mindfulness literature emphasises this in some way, but it is easy to interpret mindfulness as a fix to the unpleasantness of life. Deeper Mindfulness puts the case clearly up front, with a section on “bad weather flying”; Jon Kabat-Zinn’s famous sentence “you can’t stop the waves but you can learn how to surf” encapsulates the same perspective – the weather is beyond your control, but your response to it can be more skilful.
I would strongly recommend the practitioner training, and if you are already a mindfulness teacher then the teacher training. I can’t really summarise the whole of the course in a short blog, but below are some of the stand-out elements for me.
Firstly, the approach is predicated on appreciating that your mind is working for your own good, even if at times it seems to be creating unwanted distress. Our minds think much as our hearts beat, and trying to get rid of thinking is pretty futile. The problem with thinking is that it is often an habituated reaction, and overthinking can make matters worse. Worrying, for example, is our natural way to try prevent future catastrophe, but rather like an autoimmune disease it can get out of control. So, whenever you notice in a meditation that you have drifted off into thinking, the invitation is to pause, to appreciate and thank your mind, and then to return to the focus of the meditation.
Secondly, the approach treats distractions as an important part of practice. A meditation without distractions is like a gym without equipment. Within a practice, learning how to respond to difficult thoughts and sensations is in itself an important part of the practice. Deeper Mindfulness offers a number of ways of responding (as indeed do all the evidence-based mindfulness programmes). Losing focus is not wrong – it is an opportunity to strengthen your practice.
Thirdly, the approach takes a particular perspective on perception. Our perception is shaped as much by the mental models we use to interpret the world as it is by the stimulus from the external world. Our mental models are wonderful tools to help us function, but they can be inappropriate at times, say when we over-react to an innocent remark if our mental models are always looking out for criticism. An interesting example is in our response to pain – often we experience pain as the peak of intensity long after that peak has subsided (you really need to read the book about this).
The underlying approach is to explore feeling tones in increasing detail. The sequence of meditations invite ever-closer noting of the feeling tone of an experience (sensation, thought), and to note whether it is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. Our amazing minds filter out most of our sensations and only bring some of them into our consciousness. The invitation is to swim upstream and look more closely at experiences before they have been filtered and modified, and to simply note whether they are pleasant or unpleasant or neutral. Recently I made a conscious effort walking round a park I knew well, labelling everything I saw according to its feeling tone, and in many ways if felt as if I was visiting for the first time (a great example of inviting beginner’s mind).
I can’t really do justice to the course in such a short blog. I am still digesting it, and joining various dots (for example, the mental model perspective gives some clues to emptiness as described in Buddhist traditions). I shall be continuing the practices and sharing them where appropriately in my teaching.
Finally, why a question mark after Deeper Mindfulness in the title of the blog? Perhaps it is just a personal thing, but rather than feeling I had gone deeper through the practices I felt I had emerged into a lighter, brighter world. Maybe I should explore my mental models a little longer!
