giving you more choice in your actions, you are more likely to make informed and careful decisions. That is likely to lead to better lives for you, for those around you, and potentially for the environment and society you live in.
The next chapter will introduce you to these practices so you can learn how to AIM.
Chapter 2
SHAPING YOUR MIND
We have seen how in one mood we interpret events in one way, while in another mood we interpret them another way. How our minds are shaped from moment to moment determines how we experience things.1 The Mind Time practices we’re sharing will help you first to notice how your mind is currently shaped. And then, over time, like a potter with a wheel shaping clay, you’ll begin to discover for yourself how you can reshape your mind. That can significantly change you and it can change the world you experience.
Just as the art of shaping clay is a skilled task that can’t be forced, so the art of shaping your mind with Mind Time is also a process that can’t be forced. But it can be learned, easily, if you just keep at it for a while.
CHANGE YOUR MIND, CHANGE YOUR BRAIN
In recent years, as brain-scanning technologies have become ever more sophisticated, neuroscientists have come to see just how adaptable the brain is. The way we habitually use our minds, it turns out, actually ends up shaping and reshaping our brains – quite literally. This process is known as neuroplasticity. It accounts for the fact that if people take up an activity such as playing the violin, then the parts of their brains connected with fingering the violin strings show higher levels of activity, even when they’re not playing, and in some cases those parts of the brain measurably increase in volume and density.2
All the Mind Time practices are forms of mindfulness meditation. And we know that when people engage in mindfulness meditation, over time they too show changes in their patterns of brain activity – and also brain volume and density.
To give just a couple of examples:
Scientists at Harvard3 found that people who regularly practised mindfulness meditation over the years had an increased thickness in brain regions related to the ways we sense ourselves as well as the world around us – what we see, smell, taste, touch and so on.
Another Harvard study4 found that when people practised mindfulness meditation for just eight weeks they showed changes in brain grey-matter concentration in regions involved in learning and memory processes, the ability to regulate their emotions, their sense of themselves, their capacity to see their own perspective as just one perspective, and their ability to take and try out different perspectives.
There are many more studies like these, some of which we’ll refer to as the book unfolds. Scientists are discovering more and more every day about how malleable the brain is and how we can beneficially change it by using our minds differently.
In both of the cases above, the changes that showed up were the result of rather more than the 10 minutes per day of daily practice that we’re suggesting as a minimum. Our research tells us that when people meditate for at least 10 minutes a day their experience changes. That changed experience, we believe, will show up in time as changes in brain structure. If you keep using your mind differently, over time you change your brain.
Over the centuries, a vast range of meditation practices has grown up, from many different traditions. There are meditations designed specifically to increase focus and concentration. There are those designed to increase positive attitudes – such as loving-kindness or compassion. There are meditations to increase devotion to saints or gods. There are meditations that are contemplations on the nature of reality, and there are those that focus on sounds such as mantras, or visual patterns or images.
The Mind Time practices we’ll be sharing are different to these. Specifically aimed at helping you to develop mindful awareness, practices like them are increasingly being used in clinical, workplace and other secular contexts.
Before we introduce our first Mind Time practice, however, here’s a short exercise that will help you experience a key element we’ll be working with.
Take a moment, right now, to look around you. Notice the varieties of white in your environment.
Perhaps some are tinged with yellow, or with blue, or with grey.
See how the gradations of white might shift across any one area of whiteness. All the subtle changes.
Now select another colour and do the same.
Now, coming away from the visual, turn your attention to the sound-space you’re in.
Pay attention to the varieties of sounds.
To the rhythms of those sounds, the patterns formed by the sounds.
Linger with that for a few moments.
Letting that attention to the sound-space move into the background, now bring your attention to your body and its sensations.
Feel your body in contact with whatever you’re sitting or lying on – feel the pattern of sensations there.
Explore that for a few moments.
Now, how are you feeling?
When we teach this we often hear that right after doing this exercise people feel calm, or settled, or more alert.
What’s happening is that you’re moving your attention from being mainly caught up in mental activity – reading, understanding, thinking, planning and perhaps occasionally worrying – to a much more immediate, sense-based focus. There’s an intriguing neuroscience around these two different ways of experiencing, but for now just notice these differences.5
Because our minds tend to revert to a thinking/planning/worrying/analysing/daydreaming focus most of the time, scientists call the set of brain networks that deliver these ‘the default mode network’. It’s what our brains default to when we’re not trying actively to do anything else. For example, sitting in a traffic jam with nothing else to do, your mind drifts off into daydreaming, then to worrying about work, then to thinking about your relationship, then to wondering whether to book that family holiday, then back to daydreaming – all in the space of a few short minutes.
During Mind Time we begin to work on that tendency. We learn to recognise the default mode when it kicks in and we learn to choose to come away from it, at least for a time. As you’ll see, we do this over and over.
The Mind Time practices we will share are a key to changing your mind. The simple truth is that you will only get the benefits we promised you at the start of this book if you put in the work. But the good news is that it only takes 10 minutes a day. Just 10 minutes to change your mind!
In each chapter, we’ll be offering
