Into the Heart of Mindfulness: Finding Our Path to Well-Being

"I’ve chosen Into the Heart of Mindfulness (2016) by Ed Halliwell. This is a lovely book. Ed Halliwell was a journalist who, in his twenties, was working for men’s magazines and living quite a wild life of a young lad in the 90s, and he completely burned out and became incredibly depressed. He’s written this very moving, authentic account of how he got out of that through mindfulness. I think it’s very valuable in the way that it shows the difficulties, how challenging it is—he doesn’t make it sound like a quick fix in any way. He describes very vividly the dark places that he was in during that period, but also how mindfulness worked to help him out of that. He also has a good understanding of science and of Buddhism, so he brings to the book a lot of insight from both the scientific and the Buddhist traditions. Very much a didactic element. He uses his own story as the basis, but then he draws on science, he draws on Buddhist traditions looking, for example, at the Buddhist idea of the self and how mindfulness at its most transformative is about letting go of a more narrow habitual understanding of the self, and how it potentially opens us to a much wider understanding of the self that comes from Buddhist tradition. Not at all. Mindfulness doesn’t require any kind of belief system. But I think what’s valuable is that, through mindfulness practice, we might start to have a glimpse of some of these things, that some of the things that we think, for example, are very solid in terms of our self-identity are not as solid as we believe. We notice that flux of experience in mindfulness practice, so we might begin with some very practical motivation like we want to reduce our stress, or we have an issue with depression, or we want to be able to focus better in our job, but as we practise more and more, we begin to notice that some of the things we might have taken for granted about our experience are not necessarily the way we thought they were. Then, if we want to go more deeply, traditions like Buddhism give us some potential insights into how to interpret what we’re experiencing on a practical level. In neuroscience, some neuroscientists have talked about what they call ‘ipseity’ which is the bare sense of ‘I’. As far as I understand it, this is the kind of ‘I’ that is engaged in direct perception before we then begin to layer many layers of interpretation and concept on that. What mindfulness allows us to do is to recognize that directness of initial perception and experience, and to notice the layers of interpretation that we put on to it that we then tend to label as ‘self’."