73% of UK adults suffer regular anxiety.
Until 2016, I was one of them. Then I studied with a monk for 5 years, practised mindfulness for over 20,000 hours, and I’ve not had a sweaty palm since!
In 2018, I was given teaching lineage to the Buddha, which means I’m qualified to teach you about this stuff. But I’m not Buddhist, and nor was the Buddha. This isn’t about religion or superstition.
The Buddha was really the OG psychologist, and in this post I’m going to tell you what he taught, not to the masses but to the monks—to the people who were committed to getting free of anxiety and learning to stay calm at all times; in all circumstances. (But don’t worry—you don’t need to practice for 20,000 hours before you start seeing results.)
Meditation vs. Mindfulness
Now, most people who meditate think that if they do it for 20 minutes in the morning it’ll have some kind of magical effect on the rest of their day. This is nonsense. The only way a 20-minute meditation can have an effect on the rest of your day is if you practice—deliberately or by accident—what you were practising in meditation, but on the bus or at work.
When you think of meditation, you probably think of sitting with your eyes closed and watching your breath. This is an excellent practice. But it’s not the only excellent practice. When you do that sitting meditation, you’re using the breath as what’s called an object of meditation. That means you’ve chosen to pay attention to it, non-judgmentally, and return your attention to it when you catch yourself daydreaming. But here’s what meditation teachers typically don’t tell you until later: you can actually use anything as a meditation object!
You may have heard of body scan meditation. Obviously, that’s about using the whole body, sequentially, as the meditation object. Or you may have heard of walking meditation, which is about using the sensations of walking as the meditation object. But you’ve probably not heard of driving meditation, typing meditation or pooping meditation. Anything you experience can be used as a meditation object.
When I met my monk teacher, he very quickly got me experimenting with making my whole life a meditation. That meant paying attention to everything in the same way I paid attention to my breath in sitting practice. If this sounds daunting, I understand. We live in the age of endless distractions. But hey, what if you learned to use your distractions, themselves, as opportunities to practice mindfulness? Wouldn’t that be something like a cheat code? It sure as shit was for me.
When I started treating everything as a meditation object: exercise, work, socializing—and all of my thoughts and feelings as I went about these things—everything changed.
Then, instead of doing my 20-minute meditation in the morning and hoping that would somehow ward off my anxiety throughout the rest of the day, I was meditating on anxiety as it occurred! In other words, I was paying attention to my anxiety in a non-judgmental way, as often as I could. This seemed difficult in the beginning, but the more I practiced, the more relief I experienced.
The Paradox of Acceptance
No longer was anxiety a mysterious puppet-master, pulling my strings and making me act without my permission. No longer did I avoid conversations with people I didn’t want to bump into or turn down work opportunities I didn’t think I could handle. More and more, I saw anxiety for what it really was: just a cocktail of sensations—sweaty palms, increased heart rate, tense shoulders—and I just looked right at that stuff without resistance or wishing it were different. And paradoxically, the more I was able to accept it, the more it dissolved.
This is the real difference between formal meditation and moment-to-moment mindfulness. If your meditation is confined to 20 minutes of your day, it’ll have wonderful benefits, but I’ve worked with hundreds of practitioners who’ve founded that no matter how well their meditation goes, those benefits will fade soon after the session. But when they take up mindfulness as a 24/7 thing, then they can practice with their anxiety or low self-worth or mind-wandering in the moment; in the actual circumstance where it’s a problem. And this changes everything.
The beloved teacher Ram Dass asked us all, ‘do you want to be a meditator or do you want to be free?’
When I heard that question, I knew immediately. I didn’t want to have to do or not do anything in order to be free. If there was, indeed, a freedom that was totally independent of circumstances, that was the freedom I wanted—and it’s the freedom into which I’m inviting you now.
Natural Meditative Stability
The mindfulness practice I’m recommending simply stops being a practice at all once you relax into it fully. You realize that you’re not really doing something when you’re mindful but, rather, you’re stopping something. You’re stopping the compulsive overthinking, resisting, desiring that our culture trained you into. And when you stop all that, you realize that what we call ‘mindfulness’—that relaxed, open, calm, spacious, easeful way of being—is actually your default mode. And it’s the happiness you’ve been searching for your entire life.
My student Adam realized this when he saw how he was bullying himself to try to get things done. Looking right at that mental/emotional pattern—which he’d been running since childhood—he realized how much it was getting in his way. Letting it go, he became able to simply do the things he wanted to do—rather than assuming he had to whip himself into shape first.
To find out where you’re at in your mindfulness journey—and learn how to get to the next level—take this 1-minute quiz.
With love from my sofa,
dg💙
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