Owen OKane - Ten to Zen: Ten Minutes a Day to a Calmer, Happier You

Dedicated to the memory of my mum, Kathleen,

who taught me most about kindness,

compassion and living life fully.

Contents

Introduction

Sometimes life can be hard and situations difficult to manage. In my work as a therapist, I often see people with problems that may be familiar to you:

Do you ever feel overwhelmed and unable to cope?

Do you worry constantly and feel exhausted or irritable and angry?

Have you lost your zest for life and sense of fun?

Are you experiencing relationship difficulties?

Do you over- or under-eat, or rely on stimuli, such as alcohol, medication, drugs, shopping, sex and social media, to cope?

Do you ever feel helpless or worthless and that you are just not good enough?

This list is not exhaustive and you may have different challenges, but if some, most, or all of these resonate with you, let me assure you that you are not alone. Help is at hand. My Ten to Zen workout will show you how you can learn to manage these difficult emotions and ultimately live life in a calmer, happier and more authentic way.

Have you ever looked at all the happy images on social media Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and had the envious thought that everyone else is having a great time? This can happen even when we know we are only seeing a carefully edited version of reality. Yes, its great to share the happy stuff, but where are the rest of the pictures? The narratives we share on social media are what we want others to see and believe of us, while we rarely post about the challenges we are all living with.

What a relief it would be if we could all be truthful about who we really are, without apology. If we could only be honest about the glorious, wonderful confusion it is to be human. Within this confusion there are many insights and possibilities for growth, but these will only emerge if we allow ourselves time to stop and reflect. Our culture promotes distorted news, edited stories and a frenzied pace of activity and we all do so much stuff that we are often burnt out even our children. So within this book I encourage you to take time out for just ten minutes every day, with the hope that this time will become a central part of your life. I also encourage you to address some of the difficult aspects of your life in a safe, controlled way, helping you move towards a truer version of yourself.

We all struggle at times I know this to be true both personally and professionally. This book offers the Ten to Zen solution, a starting point for regaining control, and making your way back to a calmer mind and better life. I dont promise to wave a magic wand or sprinkle fairy dust. However, I do promise to share with you some effective, life-changing techniques. These techniques and principles for living are based on some of the best-evidenced psychology models used in my work as a psychotherapist, my experiences of working with the dying and some of my own personal experiences along the way.

A Workout with a Difference

My workout stands out from the others partly because of the timing. The beauty of Ten to Zen is that you really do need only ten minutes a day to benefit from it. But it is also different because it goes much more deeply into why we are becoming distressed in the first place.

We all know it is impossible to feel calm and in control all of the time, yet finding a way of regaining a sense of perspective is, at times, essential. That doesnt mean its easy though, and in the initial stages of developing Ten to Zen I thought hard about what an effective daily mind workout might look like. In essence, I wanted it to do the following things:

To help people find a way of stopping, and slowing down quickly

To help get them out of their distressed head space

To help them regain a sense of perspective

To help them move forward with a greater sense of calm and control

But how would I do this? Initially I knew I would use the techniques Id picked up from my training in psychological therapies, but I also wanted my approach to be more than a set of skills I wanted the Ten to Zen workout to embody principles for more peaceful, authentic living. This prompted me to engage with the insights I had gained from my work with both the dying and the living over the past twenty-five years.

So now I ask you to keep an open mind and commit to the time required to practise wholeheartedly. Be prepared for a fresh start and hold on to the thought that whatever has gone before, that moment has now gone. The only important time is now.

There is space in the Take a Moment exercises in this book to write your own notes, or you may prefer to have a special notebook that you use when doing your Ten to Zen workout.

Influences from the Dying

For many years before becoming a therapist I worked as a nurse in the palliative care world, and I would often hear dying patients talking about regret, and how they wished they had used their time differently. Im now a senior psychotherapist and, at the time of writing this, a clinical lead working in the National Health Service in the UK.

I can still hear the voice of a man in his seventies who was in a hospice, saying, I spent so much time worrying during my life, I wish I had learned not to do that.

In fact I have lost count of the number of times Ive heard people talk about how stressful life was for them, how they had got their priorities wrong and the oh-so-familiar words, If only I had my time again.

What I learned from these patients is that they felt so much of their precious time had been spent on stuff that wasnt really important. Hearing this sparked my initial desire to develop something to counteract this. I wanted to share with a wider audience what I saw as the privileged experiences Id had while working as a nurse.

At the same time, I realized that very few people were taking time out of their busy lives to look after their minds. Starting a book by saying that it has partly been influenced by experiences with the dying might seem an odd choice and some of you might be concerned that the content will be bleak. Let me assure you nothing could be further from the truth; it is life-affirming.

In essence, Ten to Zen is a daily mental workout aimed to help you live life more fully, more deeply and with more enjoyment. Through my experience working in the world of physical and mental healthcare I have seen that the process of death brings with it many lessons for those who journey alongside. Lessons of hope, courage, perspective and joy, as well as ways to live peacefully with what time we have left.

The numerous insights Ive received from the dying could fill a whole other book, and the stories are varied and diverse, but the themes that dominated were often remarkably similar: worry, psychological distress and fear often stopped people living life as fully and happily and authentically as they would wish.

Being a palliative care nurse brought me face to face with peoples lives: their happy memories, their priorities, their regrets. I found that they all wished theyd spent less time stressing about things, that they all wished theyd enjoyed the good times more fully, that theyd paid more attention to all the potential pleasures in life. This triggered a desire in me to create an effective, reliable process that everyone can use on a daily basis to calm their minds and to start to live in the here and now. Because in my experience, very few things are as important.