 Well mindfulness is – the word in fact – is a translation of a word sati which is a parlie word parlie is one of the languages in which the original Buddhist texts were written down about two or three hundred years after the death of the historical Buddha as far as people can tell Can tell. And sati means to be aware or awareness originally from a Sanskrit word meaning memory. But it doesn't mean or came to mean not the memory in some dragging things up from the past, but more memory in terms of awareness. As we might say to a child who is misbehaving in church, remember where you are. Well we try to make the child behave by saying remember where you are. Ondwhen we say to a chael wnaeth Newspaper y gallai meddwl we fo, we are not saying to them to use your memory in a sense. But becoming aware of where you are or be mindful of where you are. So in that sense mindfulness is about awareness. Knowing what you are doing as you are doing it. In that sense it is really simple, but like most simple things it is quite difficult to keep in mind. In fact to remember to be mindful, it turns out to be quite difficult. And gradually it became used in the monasteries in Asia and cultivated as one of the hallmarks of meditation practice. And the traditions spread largely because the merchants were going all over the place then and the writings of the monks or the early disciples of the historical Buddha a wneud yn ystod hynnybwyr yr adnoddau, felly yma wedi bob yn gyllidech chi, st Iddo ddweud amlaedd yn unrhyw fydd, am y pryd, chyfligfyrdd hynny, a yn amlwg yw heddiw, wedi gael bod gallai rhan o bwynynt yn cyfeirio ac yn andriu. A lle i gynnig, am y cyflogwr nobl, bydd o'r ysgrifiad, bod yr unig yw ysgrifennu yn gynnig amlwg erbyn, fydwch ar y sylwr, dwi'n gwneud gofyn. a mae'n dweud i'r parwg hyn, le mae'n ei ddwybod yn fawr. Fy fyddyn ni wedi'u gweld ychydig sydd ymgyrch o meditwyddiadau, ond yw'n meddwl, mae'n fawr oes yn ei fawr i'w ddweud, a'i ddweud o'r ddweud i'w ddweud. Mae'n ddweud i'w ddweud i'r ddweud i'w ddweud i weithio oherwydd mae'n gweithio oherwydd. Dwi'n ddweud i'w ddweud i ddweud i'w ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ffrwyd, ..y'r ffordd i'w gobl y dyfodol yn ystafell oedd ystafell ymlaen. Yn ymell, mae gen i'r ffordd ond yn ddwy'r llwy. Yn ddiddor, John Teasdale, y cofawr ymlaen... ..y'r ffordd i'r tyf yn gallu yn gwneud hi'r ffordd... ..i'r ffordd i'r llwy. Mae'r ffordd i'r ffordd o'r ffordd i'r llwy. Dyma'r ffordd i'r llwy. Mae'r llwy ddwy'r llwy o ddwy'r llwy... ..o ddweud! Well, then you taste your food, but most of the time, food is actually quite difficult to taste. We just sort of gobble it down and then we wonder where it went. Do you love anybody enough to give them their last rollo was an advert a few years ago? And you know, it would be all right if it really was the last rollo. But actually it's usually only the second one you're going to taste because you tasted the first and all the middle ones usually go without even noticing. So it's not really the last one at all. It's only the second one. Anyway, back to the talk. Awareness, non-forgetfulness, traditionally cultivated by meditation and having two aspects to it, as all meditation does, a concentration aspect, a gathering of attention, a gathering together of what is usually dispersed and scattered. Concentration is perhaps the wrong word because it implies a sort of frowny sort of effort. It's actually more like calmly abiding with the present moment and to rest and usually the meditation involved focusing on a single object and we often use the breath for that. And if the mind wanders, we invite people to come back to the breath without giving yourself a hard time. Not that meditation is not trying to clear the mind, but just notice that it's gone. The breath provides a sort of an anchor point. And therefore you come back again and again to the anchor point. So you begin to see where the mind is pulling you to. If you didn't have the anchor point, then it'd be like sort of letting go of a kite. It would just go with the wind. With an anchor point, you have a sense of where the tug is on the anchor point, on the kite. And that's really useful coming back all the time. And then as well as the focused attention, there's wide awareness. There's the sense of being able, having trained your attention to then become aware of the patterns of the mind, what tends to take you away, and what begins to ensnare us by, as it were, entangling our minds in, as Rilke once said, entangling our minds in knots of our own making and struggling lonely and confused. He used those words in his poem, Gravity's Law. So from that cultivating the wider awareness comes sort of insight into the pattern of the mind. And so, focused work and insight work. That's the nature of the mindfulness meditation. So how is it used? Well, John Cabot's Inn started in 1979. He's an American, originally a molecular biologist. But he set up a stress clinic in the heart of a hospital in New England, in Massachusetts, a place called Worcester, Massachusetts. And it's about the same distance from Boston as we are from Worcester here in Oxford. And in a general hospital, he started to gather together a lot of these ancient meditation practices that usually you'd have to go to a monastery in Asia or to a retreat centre up in the mountains. And he started teaching patients in chronic pain how to do this meditation. He had some mindful movement and some yoga there. He had people sitting on stools or on chairs just focusing on the breath. It turned out to be remarkably effective in allowing people to deal with or live around the edges of their chronic pain. So that was one movement away from the monastery into the discovery that there were ways in which you could put together a secular form of these ancient, what had become known as religious practices, although in the start of them, they probably weren't religious in the way we understand it at all. And it turned out about very effective for pain, for stress. He did some research on psoriasis, that sort of skin condition, and found that just 10 minutes of listening to a meditation tape instead of listening to music actually got the clear-up rate going faster, significantly faster. And there were two randomized controlled trials on that. And in the early 1990s, myself and my colleagues, John Teasdale and Zindall Siegel from Toronto, we were struggling to understand and to provide a new approach to recurrent depression. It had become clear that depression, when you've had it, tends to come back. And although antidepressants work really well, they work only tend to work for as long as you're taking them. And when you stop, although you don't get depressed immediately, it can come back. Of course, many people find that it can come back even when you're still taking them. And so recurrents of depression became the big problem within clinical psychology and psychiatry. And we wondered whether this eight-week program that John Kabat's in had, if it could be adapted by introducing some of the cognitive therapy principles that we knew worked when people were depressed, could we put them together? And that's what we did, finding something which we then called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. The cognitive therapy elements are relatively small, but the whole nature of the work is one in which we are trying to bring together psychological science and this ancient wisdom, this ancient psychology as well from Buddhism, to see whether bringing this ancient and modern together it could be effective. And I'll mention something about the effectiveness later on. The problem with depression is that once you've had it a few times, it tends to easily kindle. That means that although the first depression might have been due to a major, major thing happening in your life, like bereavement or separation or divorce or unemployment, that might be the first depression. Often it happens even before you've got to those sort of life events in childhood or adolescence. But once you've had depression, you don't need a big life event to trigger another one. And if you've had two or three, then it can be just come out of the blue. You can feel yourself down one morning and by the end of the day, you're feeling really, really wretched. So it's now being used, mindfulness is being used not only in the clinic, but also in schools programmes to help children to attend. There's work in Amsterdam on ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And for the parents of children with ADHD who are often very stressed, sometimes they had attention problems when they were young themselves. And it turns out that actually at adults, they sometimes have problem focusing as well. So for the parents and the children with ADHD, for health anxiety, we've just finished a trial on people that find themselves always worried about their health despite any reassurance from their doctor. And it seems to help there as well. And we're now starting projects with teaching midwives how to teach people who are expecting a baby how to be mindful and to approach the birth and the parenting with more mindfulness. This is not like natural childbirth. It's more like don't know childbirth. Like you don't know what's going to happen. And therefore how can you sustain a sense of being aware and to some extent in control in a situation in which you don't have very much control. And that's happening here at the Oxford University Hospital, what we used to call the John Radcliffe. So that's how it's being used. And the next thing, who is it for? Well, we've talked a little bit about schools and people with attention problems, people with depression. But of course, you don't have to be clinically ill for mindfulness to be quite useful. Many people now find it's really helpful just as a way of checking in with yourself on a day by day basis. Because the world is, as we've said, so frantic, so hectic, that it's really easy to lose touch, to live in our heads instead of to be aware of the contingencies and the life going on around us. Many of us find we lose interest in things. Or we get burnt out or stressed or depressed. We get restless or bored. Or we just rush around. And I think it's important, therefore, to back off a bit from all these clinical informations and to consider what is the science that actually what is it we know about how the mind works that gives us a sense of how mindfulness operates. So I want to go now to how the science helps us understand. One of the most remarkable things about the mind is how even when you're not thinking very much, the mind is busy making associations. Links between one thing and another. If you put people through a scanner and you ask them to do a simple task, you don't only see one part of the brain lighting up, you see whole networks of the brain lighting up. Now by the time the scans are analysed, you might see those pictures of the brain. Maybe they've got a little dot there and you think oh that's the part of the brain but actually oh that's the bit that's lighting up most compared with other conditions. Actually often the brain, the whole brain or whole connections light up. And these connections, these associations that we make all the time are very useful to us. We know about how context can bring back whole memories. A song for example that we know from the 1960s if you feel that age, the 1970s, the 1980s. I'll wait until people nod. 1990s. How a song when you were first in love for example, you can just hear it being played and it brings back whole sort of, not just a memory but a whole bodily feeling of what it was like to be in love for the first time. Or going back to a place you visited that you lived many many years ago, you perhaps can't remember that particular street from outside but when you go back there then suddenly think oh round the corner there was a and maybe you're even right that just being there brings back because those associations have now been activated. Associations can sometimes actually fill in the gaps. Psychologists have done experiments in which they give you a list of words like sweet, honey, white, cane, syrup. You can list the words rather like that and then they show you some words later on and they say and which of these words were in the list? It was sweet, sweet, cane, sugar, people say oh yes that was there, that was there, that was sugar. That sugar was definitely in the list. It turns out sugar wasn't in the list. You've actually thought of it because of those associations between cane and white and I mean if I'd used the word spoonful then you certainly would have thought it was in the list only due to Mary Poppins. So the associations build up and it's as if you you fill in the gaps and that means that we can do a lot of things that take us beyond just the evidence. If I said to you Mary knocked the glass off the table and Jim went to fetch her broom then an hour later if I said what happened there you'd say Mary broke a glass because I never used the word broke but you'd swear that actually you know that is exactly what happened because as we've created a model a sort of narrative in our head based on the evidence we've got and that model is what we remember. We don't remember the particularities we remember the gist and that means that we can throw away a lot of detail but when we go for the gist of things we don't even know we're creating these stories we don't even know we're creating these because it happens so automatically until we are fooled by like the sugar type experiment or by this sort of experiment so if I give you a sentence a series of sentences like this John was on his way to school he was very worried about the maths lesson he didn't think he'd be able to control the class again today he was not part of a caretaker's duty and you see you don't even know that you've got a model in your mind until suddenly it changes and so we're making these inferences all the time automatically and they're very very helpful sometimes however this going beyond the evidence gets us into problems and that's when mood either fearful mood or anxious mood or depressed mood begins to do the inferential leaps for us they fill in the gaps and so if we're walking down the street for example and we see somebody we know and we're not feeling too good that day maybe and this person just goes past without waving at us or acknowledging us in any way maybe we even went to start waving at them and they just walked past what inference would come to mind then well it would rather depend on the mood what went through your mind at that time you're walking down the street you go to wave at somebody they just walked past they didn't see me yeah fine didn't see me yeah weren't wearing their glasses they're full of Tesco's bags preoccupied they're in the world of their own absolutely have I done something wrong exactly what have I said to upset them and do you see how that early automatic inference can be affected by whether you got out of bed one side or the others this morning but once you've made one of those inferences like they weren't wearing their glasses or have I done something wrong then it sends you off in a rather different direction and if it's have I done something wrong maybe you start to wonder well what have I said to them something and then you're thinking away thinking away you're probably missing people seeing you walking down the street because you're now preoccupied and so there it goes on but five minutes time you think I won't stop for that cup of coffee I'll just go home maybe no I won't have that sandwich I'll just the tendency would do the draw and so these associations which are so useful for us sometimes going beyond the evidence to help us understand what's going on in the world can get us into problems especially when mood begins to take things over associations are not just however just thought to thought to thought that's useful we understand what the word doctor means because the word doctor brings up nurse hospital you know this sort of thing but it doesn't just go from it goes from thought to feeling well we've done a bit of that with walking down the street but also the action tendencies what do you feel like doing like when I said I just feel like going home I won't stop for that coffee that's an effect of what's happening and also the body bodily sensations they can become associated see our thoughts feelings body sensations and behaviour begin to get locked into these associative loops and although once again this is very useful because it sort of builds redundancy into the system nevertheless these loops are really important now there are lots of experiments on the effect of the body on our judgment and I'll just go through some of them because they're really interesting well I find them interesting but then I'm a psychologist so I would do but for example okay you set somebody up in an experiment and you give them a pair of headphones and you say you're doing a quality test of these headphones so I want you to go to play you some music I want you to just look at the quality of the headphones but people are going to use this when they're jogging so to simulate jogging I want you to move your head and you tell half of the people to move their head like this and you tell the other half unbeknowsely to move their head like this who do you think will rate the headphones as being better quality the nodders absolutely so there's one way in which just a simple head movement is associated with certain things and yep okay thumbs up to these headphones there's another one your your your perception is influenced by how fit you are okay now this means that it's not just like if I ask you to estimate the height of a wall if I had a wall here I just said and you might tell me how high it is or ask you to judge the height of a wall then one experiment was done on people who just ordinary people compared with people who'd learned how to run through urban landscapes you've probably seen these people on the television yeah I think they're called tracers or they or parque this is they you know they leap over this and they leap over that and from roof to roof and started in France can't think why and anyway they they learn to run through urban landscapes sometimes through actual natural landscapes as well now if you get these people tracers versus ordinary folk to estimate they think a wall is lower they actually see a wall as lower than the rest of us do so your perception is influenced by your well in technical terms is is affordance in psychology the your ability to do something in the world and your estimate of how easy it would be to do actually affects your your perception your visual perception of the world in fact this is not only the height of a wall your own height your estimate of your own height is governed by how much in control you feel so if you ask people to judge their own height either they're a real height or the height against a yep okay so if you put a spot here that's exactly 20 inches above the height the measured height of any one person and then you've got to stand back and say how much lower or higher are you than that spot on the wall and the spots up there then people will come out relatively accurately but if you actually then tell some people in this experiment now I want you to imagine I want you to think back and remember a time when you felt really in control where you had charge and responsibility it might be when you're captain of your you know girl guides team or something like that or when you are in control of whatever it was and then now how would you estimate your height people actually think they're taller but if you say to them now I want you to sort of remember a time when actually people were in control of you where you didn't feel you know where somebody was bossing you about and so on now and then you ask them to estimate their height they estimate themselves as shorter now we've known for a long while that people who are taller tend to naturally do better in the world so bishops are taller than the rest of the clergy did you know that there we are somebody once told me that's because people are used to looking up and so so that's true bosses tend to be taller than their the workforce for example but what people have now discovering is that is something which actually changes depending on you you can change people's experimental conditions so that's another way in which our body can influence our perception or our body sensations influence our perception here's a third sort of experiment and this you could call a push pull experiment what you do is you give people a joystick and you ask people to respond to this experiment either by pulling it towards them or pushing it away from them and all they've got to do is to look at some pictures on the screen and you know sometimes you have things in landscape and sometimes in portrait you know they've got this that's it it's on word landscape no landscape portrait all you've got to do is pull towards when it's landscape push towards when it's portrait or of course in some conditions you change it their way around so all you have to do is look at the shape look at the shape look at it and don't you can ignore what's actually in the picture ignore what's in the picture it turns out if in the picture is a beer and you've got a problem with alcohol you tend to pull it towards you quicker and you're slower to push away you're slower to push away the beer if it's soda it's the other way around if you've got an alcohol problem or if you've got a problem with spiders and one of these pictures you're responding to is a spider then you're quick to push it away very slow to pull it towards and of course you're not pulling or pushing for a spider you're just for landscape or portrait that's the only thing you've got to respond to the rest is all implicit now psychologists have used begun to use that by training people up unbeknownst to them to push away to alcohol instead of pull towards and they find extraordinary that when they do alcohol treatment for people who have an alcohol problem 12 months later they get 10% better effects if they've just done four sessions of this extra training learning to push away so there's a way in which the body tendency to want to push away what we don't like or pulled towards us what we do like is as if we're hardwired in and can be observed in these psychological experiments and I think I'll give one more experiment then we better pass on these are experiments that take subtle ways in which people frown or smile and then see the effect of that on their judgments so it turns out if you wire up people's faces so that you can actually do very sensitive measures on which muscles are working and which are not working you can wire people's face all round and some of them just happen to be on the corrugator muscle which is the frowning muscle others just happen to be on the muscle there which is the smiling muscle and then you ask people just to just by moving the muscles of their faces just turn the light on that's in front of them so and they don't know that what they're doing is very slightly frowning in one condition or in another condition to turn the light on they have to very subtly smile but they don't know quite they're using those muscles they're either frowning or smiling but they don't really know they're frowning or smiling but then if you give them cartoons and you ask them to say how funny do you think this is then when they're frowning even though they don't know it they don't think they're very funny but if they're smiling they do think they're funny you can extend this in another way by doing an experiment to which you ask people to hold a pencil between their teeth or between their lips and if they ask them to hold it like this or to hold it like this then it makes a difference to how funny they think the cartoons are because these associations then between thoughts, feelings, body sensations those are as it were I said hardwired but not all hardwired of course some of them are genetic but most of them are built up over the learning history of the individual you know they are learned associations I don't know if people are hardwired to like alcohol but they certainly many people learn to like it and pull it towards or push it away now this then relates very closely to what happens when we get down when our mood goes down when we're depressed or when we're anxious because depression can activate any one component of that network and the other things will start up the other things will start up so for example if you wake up very early in the morning well didn't you have to wake up early you know those moments when you wake up and you think it's Saturday and then you suddenly realise it's Monday or Tuesday isn't that the most disappointing thing in the universe and your body's not you know you hope for another hour in bed but you realise so your body's feeling very sluggish in fact there's a word for this sort of sluggishness that we all feel for the first few moments when we wake up it's called post-sleep torpa post-sleep torpa now you've got a name for it I'm sure you'll realise but once you have a name for anything it cures it but post-sleep torpa affects all of us and it just varies and how long we experience post-sleep torpa but it's that sort of twilight zone between sleeping and waking but if you start your mind thinking when your body's feeling that sluggish the mind can soon actually begin to overestimate the effort of anything you're doing that day overestimate the difficulty of all your relationships and it can begin to have an effect because of this close link between the body and the mind it has a very tight control sometimes over what you think and you can see this again even in people suffering post-traumatic stress disorder for example when they have a flashback it's not the flashback that does the damage so much so that can really start the body start the heart going but that after the heart has started going you start saying to yourself why am I still like this I should be over this by now it's shameful that I'm so weak and anybody who cries like this is completely off the crazy and that fear if it wasn't bad enough to have the flashback that elaboration can make things worse and if it wasn't bad enough to feel the body very sluggish what we then say to ourselves can make it worse in fact there's nothing in this world that is bad enough that the way we think about it can't make it even worse and that is where we can as it were begin to see the chinks that we can begin to see the bits of leverage as it were where psychological approaches might help us to relearn associations or even begin to float these things apart so we can see thoughts just as thoughts like clouds in the sky rather than feeling ourselves being sucked into them that we can when we see our body beginning to react with very clutched up or contracted we can actually just notice the body just as body sensations and prevent it from cycling back into the thoughts because when we bring awareness to any automatic association it de-automatises it when we bring awareness to any link any automatic link it de-automatises it so it means that we have a bit more space between thoughts feelings body sensations and behaviour well we've used quite a lot of examples from experiments but it's also quite useful to think of examples from our own sort of experience and from our own daily life hence the sluggishness in the morning the point about the sluggishness in the morning is that because it activates thinking and thinking then has an effect on the body and then that has more effect on thinking the mood can feel like it's getting worse and worse by itself but actually it's this loop that's actually dragging us down it's the activated loop I mean if you don't believe me then just well focus on how tired you are right now I mean I don't want you to get as sluggish as you are on a Tuesday or Monday morning but if you just close your eyes and focus on right now how tired or awake you feel just how tired or awake you feel right now and just tune into the level of tiredness maybe on a 10 point scale how tired you feel right now if 10 was as tired as ever and nought was feeling very energetic and then try saying to yourself I don't want to feel like this why do I feel like this what's it say about me that I feel like this I wish I wasn't feeling so tired and then open your eyes and now how do you feel less tired or more tired more tired yeah and that's a very interesting observation because there in that little tiny experiment all we did was suggest a few simple questions which are not themselves tiring so to ask why am I feeling this like this or even to say I wish I didn't feel like this that itself is not a tiring question to ask and yet just sort of seeing the gap between how you're feeling and how you would like to be feeling is enough to actually make you feel more tired so you can see how the tiredness is getting worse so at that point you might redouble your efforts to say oh my gosh why do I feel like this I did I wish I didn't feel like this oh and just yeah so then you and actually it feels naturally as if your body is naturally getting more tight you don't realise it's what is the thoughts going through your mind at that point that actually is driving the mood at that point but if we know it we can begin to recognise it so how then does mindfulness help this gets us to the last of our of our questions if we can see these patterns of associations between thoughts feelings body sensations and our impulses to act then as we said it de-automatises it maybe we ought to try the experiment again with the tiredness but this time I'll ask you to do something different so again if you close your eyes and just sit there and notice where whatever however you're feeling in terms of tiredness notice where in the body it's coming from and seeing if it's possible to be curious about where in the body it is where are the raw sensations the physical sensations and seeing if it's possible to notice them without any judgment allowing them to be just as they are not trying to get rid of them just allowing them to be just as they are seeing them clearly there may be tension in the shoulders a heaviness in the stomach whatever so allowing it to be felt without trying to get rid of it and a sense of friendliness towards the body as best we can and now allowing the eyes to open and taking in the room again now that's quite a difficult experiment to do but how did you feel when you were curious about what your body was doing yeah relaxed yeah a bit more relaxed did you find the tiredness getting worse and worse and worse as you did it may have happened of course but how did you find just no okay now that's itself interesting because I was inviting you to focus on your body and you might have thought that if I focus on my body when I'm feeling tired it's going to get worse and worse and worse but by focusing on the body rather than the thinking actually it gives you somewhere else to be you can focus on the body as it is and bringing curious and friendliness to the body can actually send you off in a different direction so that's a little bit of what mindfulness does it allows us to deal with what we normally think of as being sort of like I don't want this push it away don't like this well often when we see ourselves pushing away like the person on the joystick it turns out that it doesn't work if we try to suppress thoughts that we don't like for example it might work for a little while but then it comes back somebody's in a whole series of experiments on what they call the white bear test which is I mean it couldn't need to be a white bear it could be a pink elephant the instructions are simple don't think of a pink elephant for the next minute guess what happens and white bears pink elephants whatever suppression doesn't work what we resist often persists actually and so and yet it's what we do most of the time when there's things we don't like of course if there's fluff on the carpet we can get a hoover out and hoover it up but when we have a thought we don't like it won't easily be hoovered up in that way and that it can actually sometimes create even more mayhem but when we've stopped doing this if we find the worry keeps coming back we start to actually think about it we start to try and over-laborate it mindfulness is really good at giving an alternative to the the mind that tends to elaborate it spots the time when we're going beyond the evidence as we said with this John was on his way to school we begin to see things moment by moment just as they are and of course the mind will go off on one it often does but we we've got more capacity for seeing that too I was in Amsterdam last weekend at Shiphol airport I don't even have been to Shiphol airport but to get down onto the railway at Shiphol they have these long walkways a moving walkway there's a guy in front of me and he had one of these wheelie cases that has four independent wheels that would have been fine but he had another wheelie case and a third backpack and attending to all meant that he lost control of the big wheelie cases and it set off in front of him he set off after it leaving his other backpacks on but this thing gathered speed going up went onto Shiphol platform underneath the airport where the trains were coming and going out and only when I got down did I realise his panic and he was running after it it's because it had tipped over the edge onto the platform was now lying between the rails and so he looked at me I looked at him and we looked whether there's a train coming and then we looked to see if there was an electric wire and we thought there was an electric wire and then the train was due in two minutes and they tend to be on time in Amsterdam and you know praying for network rail but you know and in the end he said shall I go for it? I said okay there's nobody in authority around he dashed down got it, came up and he realised anyway he'd missed his train because it was one going from the other platform but I knew instinctively as you would have did what was going on in his mind probably for the next few hours not just the horror of that but the horror of what if and we know that when people have an event like that often the event itself is bad enough but we surround it with a whole network of oh what if what if the train had come in what if I jumped out what if there'd been an electric rail there what if actually I hadn't got up in time what if the train had come in what if the train had had an accident what you know and almost the what ifs can be as damaging for our sense than the actual thing itself mindfulness doesn't change anything in life in one sense but it helps to see the difference between events and the what ifs or between events and the if onlys because that's what we do for the past of course not the what if had happened but also if only I hadn't done this if only that relationship if only that person if only I if only I'd taken that decision in life and the sense in which we can torture ourselves with these things are able to be seen clearly in mindfulness well we've got time I think for one last short meditation and then a little bit speaking and then we'll have questions do you want to do one short meditation yeah okay so for this again if you just sit down you can come away from the back of the chair if you wish but if you want to lean on the back of the chair that's also fine and the feet flat on the ground and we'll do a short two or three minute breathing and just notice what happens in the mind and in the body so allowing the eyes to close if you feel comfortable with that or just lowering the gaze if you want to sit this out and not not do it that's fine nobody knows so think about meditation nobody can tell if you're doing it or not so sitting here and becoming aware of the body's contact with the chair and with the feet on the floor hands on the lap the spine is straight but not stiff strong back the shoulders relaxed the head and neck balanced aware of any thoughts going on in the mind not trying to change anything simply noticing what's around right now any feelings any sensations in the body and then at a certain point just shifting the focus of attention gathering it and focusing on the breath maybe noticing the sensations of the breathing down in the abdomen the rise of the abdomen wall on the in breath are falling away on the out breath see if that's true for you so we're not trying to control the breath simply allowing it to breathe us and if the mind wonders as it might do in fact probably will as soon as you notice where the mind has gone acknowledge where it went very gently escort the attention back to the breath that's what minds do they tend to wander and we're not trying to clear the mind we're just trying to wake up when it's gone gently bring it back to the breath and as soon as the mind goes bringing it back so if it goes a hundred times just bringing it back a hundred times without giving ourselves a hard time and then shifting our attention for the final time and this time expanding the attention to the body as a whole as if the whole body was breathing now aware of all the sensations in the body from the crown of the head to the bottom of our feet and right out to the surface of the skin and as best we can allowing the body to be just as we find it not trying to relax or make it different from how we find it allowing it to be as it is allowing ourselves to be as we are a sense of coming home to the body and then when we're ready beginning to move fingers and toes allowing the eyes to open and taking the room again so that's a bit of a flavour of the meditation practice that we teach people to do over eight weeks people can do it online by going on to Be Mindful online if they want to and that's the mental health foundations website bemindful.co.uk people can use books and CDs or they can come to class for eight weeks we run public classes but there are lots around now that run eight week classes does it work well our research has found that it halves the rates of depression it's as good as antidepressants but we're not trying to criticise antidepressants many people find them lifesaver and no one should ever go off their pills without telling a doctor anyway or asking their advice but it's good to know that there's something else we can do for those who don't want to be taking pills or medication as I say it's good for health anxiety and lots of other uses now all our academic papers are on our website oxfordmindfulness.org and oxfordmindfulness is one word .org and indeed this video that's being made tonight will be on oxfordmindfulness.org in about a week's time but also scienceoxfordlive scienceoxfordlive.com I think it is it's scienceoxfordlive.com both has this talk on it or will have and any follow-up information that you want so I think just to summarise mindfulness has a long, long history and yet it can also be applied to the very, very modern ways of living that we get ourselves locked into and what's lovely is to find people from the east coming over here and rejoicing in what we're doing and then sometimes going back to the east and being able to learn more about what they're doing as well some things happened over the last 20 or 30 years in which this is now dispersed it's available and it's been one of the loveliest things in my scientific career to have the opportunity to be a researcher and a scientist researching something which is also of practical value and can be taught to people and that many people find can help them in ways that are often surprising but always delightful this cultivating compassion for the self and for others treating yourself more kindly and when it works we know from our science that it works because people have learned to treat themselves more kindly and with that I'll stop the talk and take any questions you have thank you for your attention Thank you for your questions Clara is wandering around with a microphone so if you could ask your question into the microphone just to make sure that everybody can hear you and you would like to ask the first question John, your talk you sounded like you exchanged the word mind and then brain sort of as if they were like salamones and from my studies of sort of eastern religions the mind is I think well not so sort of not regarded so I'll repeat the question for if you like so the mind and brain aren't synonymous yes indeed so exactly so and actually not just eastern religions that teach that we also teach it in psychology so but you're absolutely right that because now we have the technology to look at the brain psychologists get very excited about that so some of us are neuroscientists and we just love looking at what happens when people do things on the other hand they can tell us everything and they can tell us nothing so for example if we look at a person's brain who's got a memory problem will not see the memory centre light up and we might say ah that's because they've got a problem with their memory centre and the brain but of course the reality is they're not remembering at that time you don't know actually what came first they're not remembering because they don't want to remember something and because they don't want to remember it they're not remembering it and therefore that part of the brain is not lighting up so you're quite right to say that we can't swap them about the other thing is that the best way of seeing the brain I think now is it's like a repository for our experience but our experience comes from our body in interaction with the world our selves interaction with other selves and a whole sense of self unlike what Descartes said which was actually the self where the bit that he can be certain about but as philosophers have said since then actually the reason why he's got a sense of I at all is because his interaction with other people so it's an interaction with other people other bodies other minds other objects in the world that explains our full nature of self that's another lecture all together I guess but I think your observation is quite right and if I use them interchangeably then that's my mistake and I shouldn't have done it oh how do I define mind okay well I would say that let's say the conscious mind is the awareness of our moment by moment experience but we also have to look beyond just what we're aware of because much of the mind is working as it were behind the scenes so for example there's all sorts of things you're remembering to do tomorrow and the next day which you're not thinking about now but tomorrow you'll do them so the mind is actually storing all these things up they're not there as it were not unconscious but they might just as well be for now but they're going to be retrieved at some point so the mind has to encompass our conscious awareness but also all the store of things that you've done in the past but also you intend to do in the future it's your sense of orientation in time and space your mind gives you that for nothing actually and it's tragic when that just orientation in time and space goes and we need 24 hour care many of us will end up with dementia because that's what'll happen we'll lose something which at the moment we just take for granted which is our orientation in time and space and our memory so I see the mind as a multi-layered thing but always in interaction with other people and other things in the world we can't think of the mind as an isolated entity thank you there's a question there, I think and one there well you can both shout and use the microphone I was just wondering if you think that mindfulness is as it is here as a reinvention of the invention of Buddhism in the scientific community in the West I think there's a lot of wisdom in what you say it's a secular form of meditation but it's been cultivated most intensively I think within Buddhism though actually when you get to virtually all religious traditions have a contemplative or a meditative tradition so the Ignatian tradition for example, or the Karma-like tradition Christianity, there's the Sufi tradition in Islam there's many of what we call Hinduism Indian religions which were here before Buddhism of course there are Chinese, ancient Chinese there's Taoism and Confucianism many of them are different in many ways but they all have practical implications and you might think of actually the West as having been a deviation from the norm actually inventing a philosophy which was about thinking alone often or about logic alone or reason alone because Greek philosophy was about practice about practical wisdom for example and they had their schools and they had their masters and their disciples and you could see the original Buddha as one of those schools a master and their disciples they proliferated 300 or 400 years BCE gradually as the practice spread it was taken up by the cultures and religions of the Far East as they spread and it became what we now know as religion but in the East they don't distinguish between the secular and the sacred that's a bit of a Western invention really so I think what you're pointing to is absolutely right that now as the Dalalama has said people won't get what they need by becoming Buddhists if meditation and mindfulness are useful for people then we need the research scientific evidence to demonstrate that and then it will be in the medical curriculum and the schools curriculum not because I as a Dalalama say it should be or because they've got Buddhism but because it actually works and it's effective and that's what the science can teach us and the remarkable thing is when I was in Vietnam talking with people at Hanoi and people from Thailand and India there it was interesting that they were quite interested in the science because their government is trying to make their medicine evidence based and so they would tend to turn away from their religious aspect because that seems a bit old fashioned but to actually say actually this is evidence based here is something a gift you've given to us that actually we can give you the gift of some of our evidence if that's useful for you back to you so you can actually use it in your hometown where it came from thank you what they found those people who practice mindfulness or meditation on a regular basis absolutely so there are various strategies for neuroscience one is to take monks who have been practicing for years and years and years and see what their brains look like and it's very interesting because you can get patterns there for example the centres that we know about body sensations that are activated with compassion for example when you show compassion for something or when you show empathy for something they're almost off the scale with the monks now of course that's only one strategy and it's not enough because they might have been like that as children and that's why they chose the path they did so we can't necessarily but then you can set up experiments where you ask people to do an eight week or you test people before and after they've learnt to meditate you find not that great scale of change but you find changes in exactly the same area of the brain so that experiment with the tiredness if you do that with people before they've ever meditated you tend to see all the parts of the brain to do with thinking and body sensations all lighting up but after eight weeks of meditation you get the body areas lighting up part of the brain called the insular which is associated with body sensation and body awareness but not so coupled tightly to the thinking part of the brain that normally just goes round and round in thought it's not that the thinking can't happen but the sort of uncoupling goes on that was some data that first came out in 2007 from the lab in Toronto so that's another strategy do a before and after and have a control group who don't do it a third strategy is to just measure how mindful people are in their life because there's a questionnaire as you can use some people rush around all the time they never taste their food, they only ever listen with half an ear sounds like us really but some people are really intense on that scale other people are much more naturally mindful put them in the scanner and see how their brains differ on that scale the frantic sort of rushing around all the people that have got a few more a bit more mindfulness in their lives naturally and what you find is the people who are rushing around tend to have an amygdala which is the fight and flight part of the brain which is like overactive it's pretty chronically overactive if you then ask them to do a task where they're trying to say judge emotional faces then there's a big spike and if they're less mindful the spike is higher but the height of the spike is completely accounted for by the chronic overactivity so the spike, although it looks very high and very alarming actually if you statistically remove the overactivity the spike as it disappears so it seems to be that the amygdala is like stuck in the on position for people that and often people say I'm rushing because I'm being creative this is me at my most creative I think that's probably as far as their brain is they're running away from a tiger in their brain even if they think they're being creative in their life and the fourth strategy for neuroscience is to actually measure using EEG or a MEG which actually looks at electrical activity from near the surface of the brain by just wiring up to measure very, very changes in electrical polarities in the surface of the brain and you can find difference between right and left so when the right is more active than the left people tend to be in this pushing away mode when the left is more active than the right people in the more pulling towards mode and what happens through mindfulness in a done research Richie Davison from Wisconsin has done some research to find that once people have gone through an eight week course the left gets more prominent people are more approach orientated and they even maintain that when they're feeling sad so you can do a mood induction experiment in which you actually teach people how do you give them very sad music listening to sad music we use Prokofiev and ten minutes of Prokofiev really makes people feel sad if you choose the right music now the interesting thing is you can see the sadness in this experiment normally you'd see sadness don't want sadness a lot of right frontal activity relative to left the people who've been through mindfulness feel just as sad but they're able to maintain the sense of approaching the sense of not trying to push it away and we know clinically that's really important because if you don't try and push it away it's actually more likely to go by itself if you can have the courage to stay with it it's longer it tends to float away by itself not always sometimes you might just need to do something that you know to do generally it does so that's how the neuroscience, different ways in which the neuroscience is helping us understand thank you whether you have any I'm going to say it like myself who over the last 30 years have practised various forms of meditation and fully realised how beneficial it is but who still can't seem to make that leap of practising every day despite it being so beneficial that life and washing up and all that stuff takes priority despite knowing the benefits yeah as a friend of mine who went to a nunnery once and there was a nun there digging the garden and he asked her what you're doing hoping she was going to say I'm planting vegetables or I'm planting beetroot or I'm planting leeks or whatever and she said I'm meditating I'm meditating as I do this and the intention of my meditation and she named somebody I'm doing this for and she was actually doing the gardening as it were as an act of love for herself and for this other person she was holding in mind and I think that sometimes we can often get hooked into there must be a right way to do this and usually I'm doing it wrong so one of the things is that we all tend to give ourselves a bit of a hard time yeah and that we say right unless I meditate this often this time this much then I'm letting myself down or I'm letting God down or I'm letting the Buddha down or I'm letting myself or whatever down so one of the things that we're sometimes able to do is to see if we can hear those voices in the head and to let ourselves off the hook a bit so for example if we feel that we like to meditate more often well how often and would it be helpful for example to set ourselves something to do say for a month so I'm going to focus on just the breath the tip of my nose for a month something where you can really investigate something rather than just I'm going to sit and then of course what happens is the mind I don't know if your mind wanders my mind wanders and then we can often think well this isn't working restless, boredom so one of the questions is if we give ourselves just one thing to do just for a few moments because often it's not how long we stay that's important it's actually getting there some yoga teachers say that the hardest move in yoga the very hardest move in yoga and you're thinking already is it that one the hardest move in yoga is the move on to your mat and the hardest move in meditation is the move on to your cushion or into your chair and if we learn to do that every day, every week however often it is and just once you're there then decide how long you're going to stay because 5 minutes, 10 minutes who knows, quarter an hour, half an hour there's something about the everydayness of it which helps us as you've found but when it fades if we're able not to give ourselves too hard of time it's much more likely to come back whereas if we start saying to ourselves then then it might be weeks before we come back to it if you say ah okay not now, not today but maybe tomorrow and just see if there's a lightness of touch about it then who knows thank you thank you Felly mae'r ddweud o'i wneud i ti'n gweithio y bydd nesaf, ac mae'r gweithio eich tynnu mae'n gweithio Gymraeg, ac eu tw feddwl i ti'n gwneud oherwydd. Dwi'n angen i rhaid i chi, ac mae'r ddweud yn gweithio, ac mae'n hynny'n gyfath i fynd y ddweud o'r gweithio i'r gwerthau. Mae'n amlwg i'r ddweud oedd fy ffordd. Fel y trofnod, cymaint ni'r ffordd o meddwl? Gweithiau, mae'r ffordd o'r meddwl, oherwydd mae'r ffordd, os oeddon ni galw'n gweld, Dwi'n ddych chi'n gweithio ar y cyflwyffl, a'r olygu yn gallu gydag i'r ffordd, ac rydyn ni'n golygu yn rhan o ddyn ni arall y ddych chi'n gweithio'r ddioledig. A'r ddechrau'r ddechrau, nad ydych chi'n gweithio, fel ddangos, yn ddyn nhw, bod i'n helpu, yn helpu'r ddyn ni. Christine Feldman, y ddioledig yn gweithio, mae'r ddioledig yn mynd i'n gweithio i'r ddyn ni. Ond, dyna'n ddyn ni'n gweithio. Felly mae'n rhaid i'r rhwng. Felly dyma'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r rhan. A dyma'r ffordd i'r rhan. A dyma'r ffordd i'r rhwng.