Relax — and be more productive
Michael Townsend Williams used to be an Ad Man. He worked at Saatchis during the go-go years in the 80s. Then in 1998 personal tragedy struck — his brother Jonathan died after falling from a balcony in Kuala Lumpur — and he started questioning everything. To cut a long story short, he quit his job — and became a yoga teacher.
Michael remains unusually alert to the demands of ordinary life. His dynamic approach to meditation and Mindfulness combines a focus on doing as well as being, which he calls “Welldoing”. He has written a book about it — Do Breathe: Calm Your Mind. Find Focus. Get Stuff Done. He has developed an app called BreatheSync, which aligns your breathing with your heart rate. And he kindly agreed to sit down with us in a Soho cafe and share some of his wisdom.
For non-initiates out there, can you give us an introduction to Mindfulness?
Modern day mindfulness started to gain popularity as a medically tested approach to reducing stress-levels in chronic-pain sufferers. In the 1970s and 1980s, an American professor of medicine called Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn began experimenting with a combination of techniques in hospitals. None of it was new. His approach borrowed ideas from Buddhism and yoga, and combined them in his own way. And what he found was that he could reduce the self-perceived pain levels of patients from 8 out of 10 to 3 out of 10. This was without any medication, just by using his techniques. And it’s primarily this approach that has developed into what we now know as Mindfulness.
So how does it apply to those of us who don’t suffer chronic pain?
It turns out that Mindfulness can be used to treat a wide range of conditions, but the most common of these is stress. Which is a really serious problem. The World Health Organisation has called stress the “health epidemic of the 21st century”.
We feel stressed just thinking about it.
The typical male client who comes to me operates exclusively in three states: stressed, drunk or asleep. He has no other gear. So when I start trying to teach him how to relax, he just falls asleep. To learn to be relaxed and alert at the same time is a difficult trick.
So how do we do it?
First, what you shouldn’t do. Don’t just download an app and plunge in. Until you learn certain basic things, such as how to breathe, and how to sit properly, you won’t make any progress. So as a first step, I’d actually recommend you sign up to a weekly yoga class. And start with just one session a week and then build that up to two or more. And you’ll soon reach a point where you don’t have to go to so many classes anymore and you can do it at home.
What’s the next step?
Buy a copy of my book. It’s not the font of all wisdom but it condenses the teachings of many different traditions. And it’s an easy read.
What do you say to people who say they don’t have time to meditate?
I sympathise. And I say: start small. If you can find a 20-minute period in which to meditate once a week, that’s a start. But it doesn’t make much sense to say you don’t have time for Mindfulness. It’s not an action. It’s a way of being. So once you get it, it doesn’t take any time at all. It’s who you are. To say you don’t have time for it is like the fish that says it doesn’t have time for water.
But it can take a while to get there.
Definitely. One of the main reasons people give up meditation is that they have unrealistic expectations about what they will achieve. So they give up after a few weeks, because they think: I’m no good at this. I had this experience myself. I remember this very clearly. One morning, I decided I was going to have the best meditation session ever. And so I tried to do that and it was a disaster. I actually reached the point where I gave up. I thought: this is a waste of time. And it was in that moment, of giving up, that it came to me.
What came to you?
A kind of breakthrough. A realisation.
What did you realise, Michael?
The best way I can put it is to say that it’s when you find a way to observe your own thoughts. If you think of your thoughts as clouds — which is actually a very old analogy — you reach a point where you realise that, all this time, you thought you were the clouds. But at the same time, you’re observing them, which means that they can’t be you. But if that’s not who you are, then who are you? There’s no answer to that question other than the realisation: I’m not who I thought I was. Now at first, that thought can be disturbing. It doesn’t feel like enlightenment. But it leads to an intense sense of liberation as you learn to disassociate yourself from your thoughts. If they’re bad, you’re still okay. If they’re good, you’re still okay. If they’re not there, you don’t cease to exist. Your perspective on who you are changes. I’d sum up the process of Mindfulness as removing the obstacles you’ve created around your idea of who you are.
Is there a danger, if we get too into Mindfulness, we’ll lose our competitive edge?
I can answer that in two words: Ray Dalio. He’s the founder of Bridgewater, the biggest hedge fund in the world. And he swears by Mindfulness. There are loads of examples of really successful people who now attribute their success to 20 minutes of Mindfulness every morning.
So Mindfulness can actually make us more successful.
It’s a myth, the idea that you have to be stressed to be productive. The opposite is true. What you’re aiming for is a state of relaxed attention. You need to know how the flow cycle works. It starts with struggle. You go through that with breathing, which lets you regulate your stress response, so you can cope with the struggle. Then you relax into flow, which is what happens when you let go. And then after flow, you need to recover before you can do it again.
Tell us some of your ideas about “Welldoing”. What led you to the concept?
I’d been a yoga teacher for some years and I felt I’d lost the ability to do stuff. But I was inhibited by a very black-and-white view, which said that being was good, and doing was bad, that money was bad, and spirituality was good. And so on. Yet there was a part of me that sensed this was wrong. I found inspiration in reading the Bhagavad Gita, which is one of the Hindu scriptures. And it talks about ‘inaction in action’ and ‘action in inaction’.
You don’t want to try saying that after a couple of beers.
Right. But the advice Lord Krishna gives to Arjuna on the battlefield is that “Wise men act.” The wise man moves into discomfort and in the process sees through it. Whereas if you don’t do, if you don’t move, then the thing you fear will overwhelm you. But in order to understand that properly you have to understand this idea that there is ‘doing in being’ and ‘being in doing’.
Which isn’t easy to understand.
Let me draw an analogy with the world of menswear.
We’d love that.
Your chinos have been designed so that they’re smart and comfortable at the same time. Right?
Right.
But the point is that something can be two things at once, which might at first seem to be mutually exclusive. So as we were saying earlier, you can be relaxed and productive at the same time. And in fact, there’s an argument that you’re at your most productive when you’re most relaxed. It’s the same with a pair of SPOKEs. You can be smart and comfortable at the same time. In fact, maybe you’re at your smartest when you’re at your most comfortable.
Thanks, Michael. Do you mind if we use that as a slogan?
So long as I get a cut.
This is literally the first time a SPOKEsman has turned the conversation to the subject of trousers without being prodded by us. If you want to check out a selection of Michael’s smart-yet-comfortable SPOKEs, you can find them here.
And to learn more about Michael’s work, go to his website: http://www.stillworks.org. You can buy a copy of his book here. And his BreatheSync app for iPhone is available for free download from the App Store.
