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?

I didn’t have any expectations, so couldn’t project any hopes or fears on the experience.

I guess it appealed in so much as it didn’t really feel like a religion.

The integration of meditation into everyday life was key to my decision to stop being a monk and to live instead as a lay-person.

the degree in Circus Arts that was available in London.

this is very similar to the training in the monastery, where the ego is also being challenged.

confident in our ability to fail.

It required a presence, a brutal honesty to put something out there and see what happens.

Often in life we get so caught up in the analysis, the dissection of every possible outcome, that we miss an opportunity altogether.

Of course, some things require careful consideration, but the more we live mindfully, in the moment, the more we start to get a sense of what feels right.

While the transition of meditation from East to West had been handled with great care and sensitivity by the monks and nuns of spiritual traditions, in the secular world it was done in the same way as we do everything else – in a hurry.

when you get distracted, you make mistakes.

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.

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

Well mystical things are indeed there and so is the meditation. Only this much that we take wrong mening of the word mystic and associate it with something remarkable but unintelligible. As a matter of fact all remarkable things are mystical. All extraordinary happenings are miracles. Why don't we call a telephone call a miracle!

by sitting down to meditate each day, even if it’s for a very short time, that feeling of being present, aware, and in the moment, becomes increasingly familiar and is then that much easier to apply to the rest of your life.

But if we look at the broader context, in terms of training and cultivating the mind no matter where we are or what we’re doing, then suddenly it starts to look more achievable.

you how you can continue to live in the world with a daily meditation practice bite-sized enough to fit into your schedule, yet long enough to make a difference.

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.

‘headspace’. It describes an underlying sense of peace, a feeling of fulfilment or unshakeable contentment, no matter what emotion might be in play at that time.

For some reason we’ve come to believe that happiness should be the default setting in life and,

therefore, anything different is somehow wrong.

Based on this assumption we tend to resist the source of unhappiness – physically, mentally and emotionally. It’s usually at this stage that things get complicated. Life can begin to feel like a chore, and an endless...

no matter what else happened to him in life, he would always have this place within himself to return to.

training the mind is so important.

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

lasting sense of happiness and sense of headspace is not dependent on these things.

the idea of doing absolutely nothing sounds at best boring and at worst positively frightening.

less.

Succumbing to the default non-objectivity of life without any guilt or sense of defeat is no less than a great intellectual achievement. It creates a kind of stillness in lief, a neutral place to rest one's haggard mind and body. This 'headspace' is the right zone but it is so difficult to remain there.

Mindfulness is about learning how to change your experience of that lifestyle.

For meditation to really work, to get the very best from the techniques, it’s vital that all three components are present: how best to approach the techniques, how best to practise the techniques, and how best to integrate the techniques.

This is what happens when you experience a pleasant thought. You see it, get caught up in it, and end up chasing after the thought.’

‘Over time, this will get easier. You won’t want to run out into the road quite so often and you’ll find it easier and easier to just sit and watch the thoughts go by. This is the process of meditation.’

The point is, don’t be a slave to your mind.

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.

the thoughts were autonomous and how no amount of force could prevent them from arising.

At times the mind continued to be very busy, just as my teacher had promised, but on other occasions it became very, very quiet.

Having heard about these moments of ‘no thought’ or ‘empty space’, I’d always assumed that it was something I had to do. As it turns out, though, it is in not doing that those moments arise. It is stepping back and allowing the mind to unwind in its own time and its own way that you will find a genuine sense of headspace.

the underlying essence of mind, the natural state.’

there’s nothing but blue sky on the other side.

Even when it appears as though there’s nothing but big, dark, heavy clouds, there’s always blue sky there.’

‘the sky is always blue.’

I’d always assumed I had to somehow create blue sky.

was under the impression that to experience headspace I needed to make something happen.

The truth is, we don’t need to create anything. The blue sky is headspace, and it’s alway...

It was more a case of setting up a deckchair in the garden and watching as the clouds rolled by.

Sometimes the blue sky would peek through the clouds, which felt nice. And, if I was able to sit there patiently and not get too engrossed in the clouds, then even more

of the blue sky would start to appear. It was as if it happened on its own, with no...

have a place within your own mind which is always calm, always still and always clear;

place that you can always return to, a sense of being at ease or at peace with whatever is happening in your life.