The Headspace Guide to: Mindfulness & Meditation

by Andy Puddicombe

It’s safe to assume that if you’re in a better place because you’re practising mindfulness and doing your meditation each day, then you’re going to interact with others in a more positive way as well. This is perhaps the most neglected aspect of mind training. When meditation came from the East to the West, for some reason it quickly became about ‘me, myself and I’. While this was perhaps inevitable at first, it’s important that we now, as time goes by, have the intention to make it a more altruistic type of training. My guess is that you probably struggle most in life when you are focusing on your own problems, because that’s what we tend to do as humans. We like to obsess, ruminate and analyse endlessly. OK, so we don’t actually like doing it, but it can sometimes feel impossible to stop it. But what happens when you think about someone else’s problems instead?