The Headspace Guide to: Mindfulness & Meditation

by Andy Puddicombe

So mindfulness means to be present. It means being ‘in the moment’, experiencing life directly as it unfolds, rather than being distracted, caught up and lost in thought. It’s not a contrived or temporary state of mind that you need to somehow create and maintain. On the contrary, it’s a way of stepping back and resting the mind in its natural state, free from the usual chaos.

Meditation is simply a technique to provide you with the optimum conditions for practising the skill of mindfulness.

By changing the way in which you see the world, you effectively change the world around you.

meditation, within a mindful context, was not about stopping thoughts and controlling the mind. It was a process of giving up control, of stepping back, learning how to focus the attention in a passive way, while simply resting the mind in its own natural awareness.

‘Happiness is just happiness,’ he went on, ‘no big deal. It comes and it goes. Sadness is just sadness, no big deal. It comes and it goes. If you can give up your desire to always experience pleasant things, at the same time as giving up your fear of experiencing unpleasant things, then you’ll have a quiet mind.’

‘It doesn’t require lots of thought and I still want you to focus on the breath, just counting the breaths as they pass. But, if you find yourself sitting there and you feel very good, then maintain this attitude of wanting to share it with others.’ I couldn’t really see how this was going to help, but it sounded harmless enough and the sentiment was well meaning. ‘This next bit might be a little more challenging,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘When you experience discomfort in your meditation, whether it’s the restlessness of a busy mind, physical tension in the body, or a challenging emotion, I want you to imagine it’s the discomfort of the people you care about. It’s as if in an act of extraordinary generosity, you are sitting with their discomfort so they don’t have to.’

One of the most important was that the emotion itself is often not the problem. It’s the way we react to it that causes the problem. For example, I feel angry and respond to it with more anger, stoking the coals, keeping the fire of anger burning. Or I feel worried and I start to feel worried

Exercise 6: mental body scan A great way of cultivating this quality of gentle curiosity is to apply it to physical sensations within the body. Put the book down again and gently close your eyes as before. Starting at the top of the head, mentally scan through your body all the way down to the tips of your toes. The first time, do it quite quickly, taking about 10 seconds to go from head to toe. The next time, take a bit longer, more like 20 seconds. And then do it one final time in a bit more detail, taking about 30 or 40 seconds to do it. As you scan down through the body, notice which parts of it feel relaxed, comfortable and at ease, and which parts feel painful, uncomfortable or restricted in some way. Try to do it without any judgment or analysis, but more with a sense of just building up a picture of how the body feels right now. Don’t worry if thoughts distract you every now and then – each time you realise the mind has wandered off you can gently bring it back to wherever you left off.

Getting ready: 1 Find a place to sit down comfortably, keeping a straight back. 2 Ensure you’ll be left undisturbed during your meditation (switch off your mobile). 3 Set the timer for 10 minutes.

Checking-in: 1 Take 5 deep breaths, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth and then gently close your eyes. 2 Focus on the physical sensation of the body on the chair and the feet on the floor. 3 Scan down through the body and notice which parts feel comfortable and relaxed, and which parts feel uncomfortable and tense. 4 Notice how you’re feeling – i.e. what sort of mood you’re in right now. Focusing the mind: 1 Notice where you feel the rising and falling sensation of the breath most strongly. 2 Notice how each breath feels, the rhythm of it – whether it’s long or short, deep or shallow, rough or smooth. 3 Gently count the breaths as you focus on the rising and falling sensation – 1 with the rise and 2 with the fall, upwards to a count of 10. 4 Repeat this cycle between 5 and 10 times, or for as long as you have time available. Finishing-off: 1 Let go of any focus at all, allowing the mind to be as busy or as still as it wants to be for about 20 seconds. 2 Bring the mind back to the sensation of the body on the chair and the feet on the floor.

I also asked her to write down each time she was going to miss a session – just a short sentence to say why she wasn’t going to do it. This isn’t a retrospective to be done at the end of the day, it’s about writing down, there and then, what it is you are about to do that can’t wait ten minutes. Clare found this second exercise particularly useful. In fact, she said that any time she went to write an excuse in the book, it just looked so feeble that she went and did her ten minutes anyway.