Ireland's Mister Mindfulness, Frank Liddy, becomes Zen chaplain to Belfast City Council

Image from Belfast Telegraph

If Ireland has a "Mister Mindfulness" his name is Frank Liddy and he's based in Belfast. If you're involved in mindfulness work you won't spend long in Belfast without hearing his name. He runs the Mindfulness Belfast website  along with David Cameron (no, not that one).

According to the Belfast Telegraph, he is now the first Zen chaplain to Belfast City Council "his role is to provide secular advice for the Lord Mayor, and he is also a mindfulness practitioner for Aware, the Northern Ireland based depression charity."

He was appointed as a local assistant to the Dalai Lama on the latter's two visits to Belfast.

I really like this quote from the Belfast Telegraph article:

"My Zen teacher told me that I had two lives. When I asked when I would get my second life he told me it was when I realised that I had only one. The idea is that only when you fully realise that you have one life is when you will live it to the full."

He is a member of the Black Mountain Zen Centre in Belfast.

The Meditation How website  has this interview with Frank Liddy about how he came to Zen via the trauma of the Troubles and his discovery of Transcendental Meditation.

Oh, and it you'd like to hear the Body Scan delivered in a Belfast accent, check this out.

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Seven ways to practise mindfulness of breathing

1. Focus on your out-breath
 As you breathe, give your main attention to your out-breath. Sometimes it feels as though the breath is going right down through your feet and into the floor. The out-breath tends to be particularly calming.

2. Find your anchor point
 This is the point at which you are most aware of your breathing – typically your nostrils, chest, tummy, throat. Bringing your attention to the anchor point can return you to mindfulness straight away. If you don't have a particular anchor point, you can establish one by, for instance, focusing for a while on the sensation of the breath at the tip of your nose.

3. Count each cycle of breathing
 Count your first in-breath and out-breath as one, the next as two, the next as three and so on up to seven. When you get to seven return to one again. If you become distracted and lose your place, return to one and start again.

4. Observe without managing
 Observe your breathing without trying to change it in any way. This is actually almost impossible to do but making the attempt means you really have to pay attention.

5. Visualise
 Imagine you're standing on a beach in your bare feet. The water is coming in very slowly, touching your toes, and then going out slowly again. Try to match the water coming in with your in-breath, then a pause, then the water going out with your out-breath.

6. Cool in, warm out
 As you breathe, notice that the air is cooler as you breathe than when you breathe out. Keep returning your attention to this change in temperature.

7. 5/7 breathing
 Make each in-breath last for a count of 5 and each out-breath for a count of seven.  A variation is to breathe in to a count of 7 and out to a count of 11. If you find that too much, use 5/7 instead.

You'll find a Mindfulness of Breathing audio at the link below:

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British parliamentarians recommend the promotion of mindfulness practice by government.

An all-party  group of Members of Parliament in Britain has issued a report urging the adoption of mindfulness practices in many areas of public life. The Mindful Nation UK report is based on evidence given to the group by various occupational bodies and by people involved in the promotion of mindfulness and also draws on international research.

The report recommends the promotion of mindfulness practices particularly in education, health, the workplace and the criminal justice system.

It includes case studies and references to research and would be particularly valuable if you're interested in promoting the value of mindfulness within particular settings such as a workplace.

Some main points from the report:

Health
The NHS should make Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy available to the 580,000 adults each year who will be at risk of recurrent depression.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence should review the evidence from mindfulness-based interventions in the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome, cancer and chronic pain.

Education
The Department for Education should designate three teaching schools to pioneer mindfulness teaching.

Schools should be offered the opportunity to bid for a fund of £1 million a year to pay for training teachers and mindfulness.

Workplace
The Department for Business Innovation and Skills should work with employers to promote the use of mindfulness.

Government departments should encourage the development of mindfulness programs in the public sector.

Criminal justice system
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy should be offered for recurrent depression to the offender population.

The effect of mindfulness-based interventions among the U.K.'s offender populations should be researched.

You can get a PDF of the report at this link.

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Suspend the need to know

Much of the activity that goes on in our minds can be seen as an attempt to know what is going to happen or what might have happened. Suspending the 'need to know' for a while allows us to bring clear awareness to our experiences right now.

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Letting unpleasant emotions fade

To allow an unpleasant emotion to pass in its own time, move your attention from your thoughts and onto the physical sensation that accompanies the emotion.  The physical sensation will fade and the emotion will fade along with it, so long as you don't keep it alive with your thoughts.

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Mindfulness is about the body as well as the mind

We live in an era in which we see the contents of the mind as more important than the state of the body. For that reason we can over-emphasise the "mind" in "mindfulness" by paying too much attention to our thoughts and to how we relate to them.

For instance, we often view habitual reactions as events in the mind, in other words as thoughts that we think over and over again. This is often true but another kind of habitual reaction happens without words. This is a purely physical response and these responses are happening all the time below our awareness.

Maybe you see an old neighbour who reprimanded you as a child and you tense up without realising it. Or you huddle up physically walking along the street in a light rain as if you were in a sandstorm in the Sahara, but you don't notice you're doing it. Or you lean physically away from your partner because you're annoyed with her but you're the last person to realise you are doing this.

This is why mindfulness of your physical self, for instance of your posture, can be such a rich source of information about what's going on in your life. Of course it can also help you to drop responses that used to make sense but don't any longer.

Mindfulness of the body is the first of the mindfulness practices recommended in The Four Foundations of Mindfulness, a set of instructions dating back about 2,000 years. That, I think, underlines the importance of the body as a focus of mindfulness.

How to do this? Mindfulness of breathing is the most popular way but you can also be mindful of the feeling of your feet against the soles of your shoes, of your posture, of walking, or of the sense of energy in your entire body. You may find that some of these work better, especially if you're agitated,  than mindfulness of breathing and it's well worth the effort to find out what's best for you.

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Better a moment of awareness than repeating old thoughts

Notice how the statements we make over and over to ourselves are usually just old opinions that don't really need repeating - better to come into silent awareness of this moment.

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