I’ve been working on the course that I’m giving this week in London - It’s about “poisoned patterns of the mind” and it seems to have caught quite a lot of people’s attention.

I’m interested in the patterning of the mind at the moment. I read Norman Doidge’s excellent The Brain That Changes Itself over December and it had quite a mind-changing effect. (Fittingly enough). The hope that neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to grow new neural pathways in adulthood) offers us is immense. Not just for phantom limb sufferers, or stroke victims, but also physically healthy humans who suffer from disordered thinking, depression and mood malfunction. And that latter category, of course, includes just about all of us.

Naturally, as a trainee therapist, I have a vested interest in neurobiological evidence that shows that the way we think and experience the world with our brains can be changed. Otherwise why would I bother practicing? As a long term meditator, I know for a fact that the brain changes. In the 10+ years I’ve been practising, my awareness of myself in the World has changed unutterably. Some of that is down to solitary practice, some to brilliant teachers, some to Ayahuasca. But the fact remains that I experience the world and my existence quite differently from the me from 1999. Qualitatively better, I would say.

So, what about “poisoned patterns”?

Neuroscience shows us that neural patterning creates the pathways through which our experience of the World and our internal response to it flow. I don’t subscribe to the materialist view that consciousness is the wet stuff of the brain. Rather I subscribe to Alva Noë’s notion that consciousness is function of a brain in a moving body in a World. So the way the brain patterns it self is a constituent factor in our experience of the world.

The neurobiological rule is: what fires together wires together. That is, the neurons that regular get activated become stronger and the pathways more robust. It’s like a path down a snowy hillside. There are infinite possibilities of getting down it when the snow is virgin but once one toboggan has gone down, the chances are the next dozen or so will go down a very similar path. Eventually, the icy tunnel is etched so deep that it’s almost impossible to find another route down. This is what happens with the brain pathways.

Strongly enforced neural networks tend to “hog the signal”. New experiences, original thinking, creative exceptions all get edited out by the insistence of that deep runnel in the snow. Anything that happens tends to get experienced the same way: our emotion, our thinking, but also our perception starts to use a very limited palate. Our actions, likewise become very circumscribed.

This is bad news if your neural pathway keeps on leading you to a heroin dealer or to uncontrollable rage. Neurons are not picky. If they fire, they’ll wire.

There is also the contrary rule: use it or lose it. Neural networks that don’t fire very often get dismantled and other processes take over the brain’s ‘real estate’.

This is good news if we’re trying to break up the patterning in the brain. Giving up cigarettes for example - once we’re through the cold turkey and years have past, we can look back with puzzlement at our 60-a-day habit. That whole nicotine-dependent network has been reassigned to some other brain pattern.

What is clear to me as I think about this issue is that patterns are not inherently “poisoned” - what is problematic is not their toxicity but their fixity.

Which is where mindfulness comes in as a useful tool for breaking up unskillful patterns in the mind and freeing up neural real estate for something more beautiful and life-enhancing.

Fixity is a problem for meditators. The more you meditate mindfully, the more you realise that there is no ultimate stillness, no pattern-free zone. Being alive means motion and it means patterns. What we discover, paradoxically, is that we have to stop trying to pattern the pattern and let it be.

So this weekend, we’re going to be exploring not only the problem of fixity in the way we think and ‘hold’ our experience - but some potential solutions. Can mindfulness offer a ‘delicate pickaxe’ to tease apart the elements that make up these fixed paths down the neural hillside and re-introduce some flexibility, fluidity and novelty into our way of existing in the world?

Of course, I’m biased. I’m sure it can.

The course up on Holy Island was truely wonderful this year. It was a great group and there was a palpable energy flowing round the Peace Hall, all conducive to some excellent work.

One of the big insights for me this year has been the importance of energy in practice. It came to me one afternoon that practising meditation without working with your energy field is like having a yacht, trimming the sail, spinning the steering wheel but not looking over the side and noticing that you're held fast in a frozen sea. No amount of steering or trimming is going to make you move until there's a thaw. Similarly we sometimes practice up in the small, claustrophobic space of our heads and wonder why we're just rotating in the same grist-mill of thoughts.

The retreat was all about dropping down - looking at the level below and working skilfully there. Dropping into the body, into the emotions, into the space we create between ourselves and others and most importantly into the energy field we cultivate, invisibly, around us.

Because this energy is outside of conscious awareness it can be very sticky for a very long time. All the spiritual traditions that work with body movement, with chi, and prana, and the Tibetan energy-winds, understand that the 'thinking mind' is one small portion of our Being and that by opening up to greater and greater spaces we allow the energy to flow more healthily.

It's like putting a spoonful of salt into a tea cup of water or into Lake Eyrie. The more spacious the vessel the less overwhelming the experience.

Reginald Ray's wonderful book Touching Enlightenment emphasises this important 'dropping down'. He urges us to rethink the model of the 'thinking brain' as the controller and dictator of Being but instead to picture it as the listener, the receiver of the messages that come up from the vast spaces below. All the energy, life, information is down in the body, the emotions, the interpersonal space, the universal space - the thinking mind can just float on top, responding and listening rather than strutting round like a delusional potentate.

The image came to me of a little wood and wire structure sitting on top of the back of a massively majestic whale.

Invest in the whale energy.

I (Alistair) went to an amazing workshop this weekend with Alan Dolan.

Alan is a fellow workshop-leader at the Special Yoga Centre, or at least that's where I heard his name first. Someone recommended going to his classes years ago but for some reason it never quite happened.

Transformational breathing was developed by an American, Judith Kravitz but has older roots in the Shamanic traditions of the Americas. Different from the pranayama breathing that is practiced in Hindu yogic traditions and certainly wildly different from any Buddhist use of the breath, Transformational Breath looks at using continuous breath as a way of creating a heightened state of being in which energy flows unimpeded by normal thinking constraints. Or at least that is the way I perceived it.

It was a tremendous session. Three hours long but with a breathing session of about 90 minutes that could have been 10 or 10,000 minutes long from where I was lying. Perhaps because I am familiar with the Ayahuascan state, I found it incredibly easy to slip into a very lucid, very peculiar plane where energy roared through my body and where I could literally feel the energy centres of my body cascading outwards. I don't remember a single thought. It was all body energy and clearing.

Alan describes it as the energy body doing what it naturally does when it's not caught up in the thickets of thinking, little-ego structures. Bodily knots, emotional knots, spiritual blockages - they all come up and get blown away (literally) by the bellows of the breath.

This is really interesting to me right now because I have become aware of lots of practices that seem to circumvent the knottiness of the thinking, self-shaped mind. AIT (Advanced Integrative Therapy), EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique or 'tapping), the magnificently intense Ayahuasca therapy and this, transformational breathing, all in different ways point to the same thing: that our energetic selves are way more intelligent than our thinking/conscious selves and that we can do our selves a great favour by getting out the way of energy and letting it happen.

I felt about a metre taller as I left the hall and slept the most beautiful sleep I've had in ages. If you're near London, Cambridge (or Lanzarote!) there are more of Alan's courses. And we spoke about maybe collaborating in the future. Yay!

I’m still a bit dizzy from the events in London town these last few days but one thing jumped out of the disorientating static of misinformation, knee-jerk rage and analysis in the media. I was struck by the number of times the word “mindless” cropped up on Twitter and Facebook and in politician’s mouths.

“Mindless criminality”, “mindless violence” and even “mindless scum”.

It made me think: what could that possibly mean? To act or commit a crime without a mind to frame it?

Putting aside the very unlikely scenario that thousands of young people in one of the most affluent countries in the world were born without minds and lived unnoticed in estates across London waiting to explode onto our streets, I think we can assume we’re not talking literally. Last time I checked it takes a fairly sophisticated mind to work Blackberry Messenger. Moreover, the part of the mind that hankers after a plasma screen can’t be too alien to the people who want these ‘mindless chavs’ shot in the head. I’m sure most of the would-be executioners have such screens hanging on their living room walls.

Let’s face it, human greed and consumer covetousness are really not that mysterious for most people living in London. They are after all the petrol that drives our market economy. What was shocking was the seemingly inexplicable eruption of this lawless greed and thirst for anarchy in the middle of an English summer weekend…

But why do we assume such anti-social behaviour is mindless?

British psychoneurologist, Peter Fonagy, has promulgated for many years a ‘theory of mind’ that sets humans (and perhaps higher primates) apart from other animal life forms.
This theory of mind is the presupposition an infant makes within the first year of life, that other people have a discrete and volitional mind much like their own. Only through this (untestable) theory can humans makes sense of others. We know our own intentions but unless we presuppose that others have a similar intentional mind then it is very difficult to negotiate the world.

On Monday night as the rioting erupted for a third night, Twitter was - at first - awash with anguished cries: “Why are they doing this? I don’t understand! It’s madness! Please explain!”. Only in the small hours of the morning did the analysis really start pouring in. We needed to know why. What was their motivation? It’s a very human need - preprogrammed at birth - to want to understand other people’s motives.

And if we’re really honest most of us can make some inroads into imagining the thrill of transgression that teenage looter might feel. We could recreate the consumer rush of new electronic goods for free, the adrenalin of being chased, of fighting or even of smashing things up. We can probably get inside of boredom, frustration, a sense of being ignored, of being talked about but never listened to. If we were really trying we might even be able to imagine the exhilaration of lawlessness.

We can do these things - i.e. come up with a theory of mind for these ‘mindless scum’ - but we mostly chose not to. Why? Because then we’d be admitting that we have a mind in common.

Fonagy’s ‘theory of mind’ is a big milestone when we’re little babies. It allows us to makes sense of our nearest and dearest’s behaviours. But once we’re adults and our model of mind is up and working for us, we start to exlude people who don’t fit in. If someone behaves in a way that is completely unacceptable to us, we blank out that empathic leap that might lead us to imagine what is going on in their mind. We would rather assume that they have no mind than admit that their mind is much like ours.

This, presumably, is what going on when we insist that these London teenagers are mindless. They’re not but we’d prefer it if they were. That way we don’ t have to deal with any uncomfortable similarities.

Inconveniently in moments like these, I have to remember that I’m supposed to be a great champion of the meditation practice, mindfulness. It would much easier to slump into the ‘they’re mindless morons’ position and be done with it, but mindfulness insists on a shared ‘theory of mind’ that is challengingly big. The Buddhist shared mind would include all animals and living beings (and neurobiologist Alva Noe argues convincingly that the simplest life form - the amoeba - is ‘minded’ because it moves intentionally to food and intentionally away from danger) but I am content with the challenge of all human minds.

This exercise of mindfulness is to be aware and accepting of every aspect of your mind and recognize that all other human minds share the same palette of base and noble emotions and thoughts. This in no way excuses ones own harmful actions or the harmful actions of others - but it does rule out the loop-hole that other human are fundamentally alien. Rather, it points to the salutary fact that if we shave off all the unwanted human qualities and banish them into other, ‘mindless’ people then we are left with only half a mind. Hence the name: mind-full-ness.

And what does that have to do with the looters who destroyed family businesses, robbed the injured and terrorized the innocent? Well, everything. If we take the mindfulness challenge then we still have to find that empathic bridge and acknowledge those darker parts of ourselves as we admit the possibility that these kids might be - individually, - bright, intelligent, potentially noble. Otherwise what are left with? Locking up great swathes of London’s population in truely mindless penal institutions while we sit justified and high-minded fearing the next hot summer day?