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Meditation isn’t about becoming a different person, a new person, or even a better person. It’s about training in awareness and understanding how and why you think and feel the way you do, and getting a healthy sense of perspective in the process.
Mindfulness is the key ingredient of most meditation techniques and goes far beyond the formal aspect of sitting down with your eyes closed. 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.
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.
drop all the baggage, the stories, the arguments, the judgments and agendas that take up so much space in the mind. This is what it means to be mindful.
Meditation is simply a technique to provide you with the optimum conditions for practicing the skill of mindfulness.
The same is true of mindfulness. You can use it in any situation and for any purpose, but the easiest place to learn the skill of mindfulness is during meditation.
Headspace is not a quality of mind dependent on surface emotions; this means it can be experienced just as clearly in periods of sadness or anger as it can in times of excitement and laughter. Essentially it’s “being okay” with whatever thoughts you’re experiencing or emotions you’re feeling.
chase and maintain that feeling of happiness.
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?
way you think and feel about those situations, the starting point is to acknowledge that it’s the mind itself that defines your experience. 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.
lasting sense of happiness and sense of headspace is not dependent on these things. This will allow you to live with a greater sense of freedom and ease, confident in where you’re heading in life and yet not so attached to the outcome that an unexpected obstacle or unfavorable outcome will result in heartbreak and loss.
But I think there’s something beneficial, even at this early stage, in noticing the habit or desire to do something the whole time.
It’s just useful to recognize that they facilitate a certain amount of temporary happiness, rather than a lasting sense of headspace.
And this is how most people live their lives, moving from one distraction to the next.
Mindfulness doesn’t require you to change anything. In becoming increasingly aware of your own mind you may find you choose to make some changes in your external life, but that’s entirely up to you.
Mindfulness is about learning how to change your experience of that lifestyle.
lives have become more complicated. For example, the World Health Organization now confirms that depression—a potential downstream complication of stress—is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and is a major contributor to the overall global burden
have the intention to make it a more altruistic type of training.
But what happens when you think about someone else’s problems instead? The nature of the internal struggle changes, right? Sure, you might feel sad or upset when you think about their difficulties, but it feels very different from obsessing about your own problems. There’s a shift in perspective. And this is such an important part of training the mind. By focusing less on your own worries and more on the potential happiness of others you actually create more headspace for yourself. Not
The purpose of learning meditation is not so that you can spend your life sitting on your backside with your eyes closed, but to integrate that familiarity of awareness into other areas of your
If I was just sitting there as an observer to the thoughts, then who was doing the thinking?
“Your thoughts are autonomous,” he explained.
We like to think we control our minds, control the flow of thought, but if it was possible to do that then you wouldn’t have traveled halfway around the world for my advice.” He pointed at me, playfully, laughing. “In fact, if it were possible to control your thoughts then you’d never have any reason to get stressed at all. You’d simply block out all the unpleasant thoughts and live peacefully with all your happy thoughts.”
mind exists to experience thoughts and feelings.
them. What you need to ask yourself,” he continued, “is how much of your thinking is helpful, productive, and how much is unhelpful or unproductive.
“If you’re worried about losing these creative thoughts,” he gestured somewhat dismissively, “then where do you think they come from in the first place? Do those moments of inspiration come from cold, rational thinking, or do they arise from the stillness and the spaciousness of the mind?
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 the mind, like the blue sky, is unchanging, no matter how we feel.
I’d always assumed I had to somehow create blue sky. I was under the impression that to experience headspace I needed to make something happen. The truth is, we don’t need to create anything.
Imagine what it would be like to be unconcerned with the volume or intensity of thoughts in your mind. Most of all, imagine what it would be like to have a place within your own mind which is always calm, always still and always clear; a place that you can always return to, a sense of being at ease or at peace with whatever is happening in your life.
more we try to hold on to these pleasant feelings, the more fearful we become of losing them.”
And as long as there’s resistance, there’s no room for acceptance. And as long as we don’t have acceptance, there’s no way of having a peaceful
“let go of resistance,” but how? “Simple. By becoming more aware,” he said. This seemed to be the answer for everything,
“When you experience pleasant sensations in your practice, I want you to imagine sharing those feelings with other people,”
simply imagine you are giving it away, sharing it with your friends and family, the people you care about.”
“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.”
reverse psychology. I guess the interesting thing was that it trained the mind to be more altruistic at the same time.
by imagining that I was doing something beneficial for others, it seemed to make the whole thing easier.
what happens when you reverse it and apply the principle of sharing pleasant feelings with others and sitting with difficult feelings on behalf of others?
“They are a package,” he said, “you can’t have one without the other. They are like two sides of the same coin.” I thought
“Have you looked to try and find this feeling, to try and find where it lives?” I’d been so caught up thinking about it that the idea of studying
just so happens that when you’re more aware there is very little room for these unpleasant emotions to operate. When you’re thinking about them all the time, then of course you give them lots of room, you keep them active. But if you don’t think about them, then they tend to lose their momentum.”
feelings do or do not exist, but you’ve found for yourself that when you study the emotion very closely, it’s actually very hard to find.
also the speed at which our emotions change, one feeling morphing into the next, can make them seem impossible to separate and define. Think back to the last time you felt happy, do you remember when it began? Take a minute or so to see if you can pinpoint the very moment the emotion of happiness came into being. And then when did it end? What about the last time
remember when the feeling of anger began and when it finished?
what your view of life is like. Does it feel as though life is working with you or against you? Does life feel like a pleasure or a chore?
Mindfulness is the willingness to rest in that natural state of awareness, resisting the temptation to judge whatever emotion comes up, and therefore neither opposing or getting carried away with a feeling. Meditation is simply the exercise that is going to give you the best conditions to practice being mindful of these emotions. And headspace is the result of applying this approach. Headspace does not mean being free from emotions, but rather existing in a place where you are at ease with whatever emotion is present.
an open mind, one that is curious and interested in the nature of the emotion itself, rather than simply labeling the emotion as good or bad through past experience.
Like thoughts, emotions spontaneously arise. It’s how we meet these emotions, how we respond to them that is important.
meditation was simply a snapshot of my everyday mind
