The Headspace Guide to: Mindfulness & Meditation

by Andy Puddicombe

Did he really think I was going to find the type of happiness and fulfilment I was after in a bottle of prescription medicine? As I walked out the door of his office he said, ‘Andy, you’ll regret this decision for the rest of your life.’ As it turns out, it happens to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Think of a circus act, whether it’s juggling, tightrope, acrobatics or trapeze, all of them require the perfect balance of concentration and relaxation. Try too hard and you make a mistake. Don’t try hard enough and you fall off or slip over.

But if you think about it, whatever you do that involves the mind is going to benefit from meditation. It’s like fine-tuning the hard drive of a computer. And is there anything you do that doesn’t involve the use of your mind? Given what a central role the mind plays in our lives, it’s remarkable that this meditation revolution hasn’t happened sooner.

Mindfulness means to be present, in the moment, undistracted. It implies resting the mind in its natural state of awareness, which is free of any bias or judgment.

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

If mindfulness is the ability to be present, to rest in the moment whatever you’re doing, and meditation is the best way of learning that skill, then ‘headspace’ could be considered the outcome.

For some reason we’ve come to believe that happiness should be the default setting in life and, therefore, anything different is somehow wrong.

If we become dependent on it for our happiness, then we’re trapped. What happens when we can’t have it any more? And what happens when the excitement wears off?

This is why training the mind is so important. By changing the way in which you see the world, you effectively change the world around you.

By focusing less on your own worries and more on the potential happiness of others you actually create more headspace for yourself.

The point is, don’t be a slave to your mind. If you want to direct your mind and use it well, then good. But what use is the mind if it’s all over the place, with no sense of direction or stability?’

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.’

when you study the emotion very closely, it’s actually very hard to find.