Get Some Headspace: 10 minutes can make all the difference (12 page)

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Authors: Andy Puddicombe

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Over the years I’ve found this story useful to reflect on. In many ways it sums up the process of meditation. And it’s just that, a process. Just because you sit for a few minutes each day doesn’t mean that you will immediately master the mind and no longer fall prey to your old habits. That’s not to say you won’t sometimes experience those ‘lightbulb’ moments, when you realise what it is you’ve been doing. But the process will likely be a gradual one, where each day you see the hole a little earlier, with a little more clarity. In doing so, you’ll manage to avoid many of the habitual reactions that stress you out. This is what it means to have awareness, to see the mind with absolute clarity.
The theatre
Pretty much everything we do in life is judged in terms of good or bad, better or worse. But when it comes to meditation there’s no such thing as good or bad, and there’s a good reason for this. Another way of describing meditation is to use the word ‘awareness’. So, if you’re unaware, then you are not meditating
badly
, you’re not meditating
at all
! It doesn’t matter whether you’re aware of lots of thoughts or of no thoughts. Nor does it matter whether you’re aware of pleasant feelings or unpleasant feelings. The skill is simply to be aware, that’s all. One teacher of mine used to repeat this like a mantra. He’d say, ‘If you’re distracted, then it’s not meditation. Only if you’re undistracted is it meditation. There’s no such thing as good and bad meditation, there is only distracted or undistracted, aware or unaware.’ In fact, he used to liken it to going to the theatre.
Imagine you’re watching a play of several acts. Your only role is to sit back, relax and watch as the story unfolds. It’s not your job to direct the performance, neither is it your job to get up on stage and start interfering with the story being told. It might be a story of love and romance, of action and bravado, or of mystery and intrigue. Or it might have elements of them all. The show might be fast moving and leave you breathless, or it might move at a very sedate pace, leaving you relaxed and at ease. The thing is that no matter what happens, your only job is to watch the play unfold. To begin with this might be quite easy, but maybe the story’s slow moving and you start to get restless. Perhaps you look around for other things to entertain you, or think about things you need to do the next day. At this point in time, you’re completely unaware of what’s happening on the stage. This is a common tendency when learning to meditate, so don’t be hard on yourself. Besides, the moment you realise that your mind has drifted off, you are immediately back with the play and following the story again.
Sometimes the story might be particularly unpleasant. In these moments it’s very difficult not to lose yourself in the play. Perhaps you even start thinking for the actors on stage. You may feel so involved in these moments that you find it hard to resist the temptation to call out, or jump to the actors’ defence. Or it might be an uplifting tale that brings about a pleasant and comforting feeling inside. In these moments you might see something in the actor or actress that you’ve always wanted for yourself in life. Or maybe you’re reminded of an old relationship and the mind drifts off to memories past. Perhaps you even feel so inspired by the story that you sit there planning how best to ask out that person you’ve been wanting to ask out for the last five years.
When you sit to meditate it’s a little like watching this play. The images and voices are not
you
, in the same way that the play or the film is not
you
. It’s an unfolding story that you’re watching, observing and witnessing. This is what it means to be aware. Your own story, as in your own life, will still require direction and a sense of engagement, but when sitting to observe the mind during your meditation, taking a seat in the audience is by far the best way of watching. And it’s through developing that ability of passive observation that you get to experience the clarity and confidence to make decisions, make changes and live life more fully. Think back to the blue sky, this space that has always been there. Awareness is not something you need to create, as it’s always present. We just need to remember not to forget.
The imaginary lovers
When I was training as a novice monk, I stayed in several monasteries that were generally closed to the public, but that once in a while opened their doors so that lay-people could come and do a one-week meditation retreat. The men would stay in the monks’ quarters and the women would live with the nuns. Each day they’d come together for a number of meditation sessions. These retreats were always conducted in silence, to offer the participants as few distractions as possible. For some people this really helped, while for others it was torture to go a whole week without talking. Every afternoon the participants would visit the respective monks and nuns and report back on how their meditation was going. Over the years the monks and the nuns started to recognise a pattern of behaviour that seemed to repeat itself. In the moments when the men and women would come together, eyes would inevitably wander, sometimes catching another pair of wandering eyes in the process. This would usually happen early on in the week. Little did the pair realise at the time the significance of this fleeting glance. The man would go back to his room and sit to meditate. Within seconds he’d be thinking about this woman, talking to himself in the process. ‘She definitely looked at me. I think I might be in there. And this is perfect, she’s interested in meditation, so we’d have loads in common. Right, as soon as we’re allowed to talk I’ll ask her out.’ Already he’d be looking forward to the next meeting of eyes.
Meanwhile, over in the nuns’ quarters, the woman would be thinking, ‘I wonder if he saw me? Did he like me? It would be so nice to be in a relationship with someone who’s sensitive enough to take care of his own mind.’ Not even ten minutes has passed and yet already the ‘R’ word has popped up in the internal conversation! This pattern would continue throughout the week, the pair stealing glances once in a while and then feeding off their projection of those glances the rest of the time. We’ve all done it, right? By the end of the week, it’s no exaggeration to say that some couples had taken that chain of thought so far, that not only had they dated in their minds, but they’d got married, consummated the marriage, had children, and spent time thinking where they might retire to. Some had even got divorced! Even though it was their own story that they were creating, they had still chosen to build in some pain and anguish. Yet they’d never even spoken to the other person. This shows how easy it is to get caught up in all the little stories, the dramas, the hopes and the fears of the mind.
Part of the reason that we get so easily drawn into these stories is that we’re so used to
doing
something, being
involved
in something, that it can feel a bit boring to just sit and watch the mind, especially if the thoughts are mundane. We create these stories in an attempt to make things interesting, to get away from the boredom. But have you ever stayed with boredom long enough to look at what it is? Is it simply a thought or a feeling of wanting to be somewhere else, of doing something different? And if so, then why treat that thought or feeling any differently from all the others you observe in the mind? As you know, just because we experience a thought doesn’t mean we have to react to it, or act upon it. We’d be in pretty big trouble if we always did. We actually have the ability not to take thoughts too seriously. It’s just that we’ve created boundaries for when we should start to take them seriously. Think back to a time when you might have had a thought that was so extreme you laughed at it. In that moment, you saw it for what it was, a crazy thought, no more than that. And so you didn’t give it too much importance and probably let it go. So we have this ability within us, it’s just getting used to the feeling of taking up the position of an observer on a more regular basis.
The screaming man
I remember hearing a funny story of a man who went to visit a Buddhist monastery in the UK. He was keen to try meditation and had heard that it was possible to join the monks and nuns in the temple for one of the sessions during the day. So, after making some enquiries, he was shown to the temple doors and left to go and find a seat. All of the monks and nuns were sitting at the front of the room and all of the lay-people were sitting behind them. Not wanting to be right at the back, he walked a little further into the middle of the room. Almost immediately a loud gong sounded which, looking around at the other people in the hall, appeared to the man to signify the beginning of the meditation session. Having shuffled around a little to try and get comfortable (he wasn’t used to sitting on the floor), he closed his eyes and began. He knew he was supposed to focus on his breath, and he thought he was supposed to have an empty mind, but he had no idea how he was going to make that happen. In fact, this was much like me when I first started meditation.
To begin with he sat very still and tried diligently to follow the breath. But no matter how hard he tried, his mind kept wandering off and he became increasingly anxious, impatient and frustrated. After a while he was so caught up in these thoughts that he’d unintentionally abandoned any idea of focusing on the breath at all. Instead he was feeding the frustration with even more thoughts. ‘This meditation doesn’t work at all. I feel terrible. I felt fine when I came in and now I feel awful, what’s the point in that? I’m rubbish at this. Typical, I’m rubbish at everything. Can’t one thing in my life go right for a change? Can’t I even just have one hour to sit and enjoy the silence? How much longer is this going to go on? It feels like we’ve been sitting here for ever. I thought they said it would only last an hour. This feels more like two hours!’ He continued to think in this way, using one thought to fuel the next, increasing the intensity of his frustration and making it more and more difficult to sit there in the process.
Eventually he reached breaking point. He was no longer conscious of that separation between audience and stage. He was now (metaphorically speaking) up out of his seat, running around the stage and creating mayhem in his wake. He had ‘become’ his thoughts. He was desperate, unable to contain himself for a moment longer. Without even being conscious of doing so, he jumped up from his seat in the middle of the temple and screamed out at the top of his voice, ‘I can’t fucking do this any more.’ In a twist of cruel irony this was followed immediately by the gong, signifying the end of the hour and the end of the session.
There are several valuable lessons here, each as important as the next. First, if you’re going to learn a new skill you need the right instructions. It’s no use thinking, ‘Oh well, how hard can it be to just sit there and watch your own mind?’, because, as the man in the story demonstrated, if you don’t know the right way of watching the mind, then it can be very difficult indeed. The second is that if you’re going to learn how to meditate, then start slowly. There’s nothing wrong with taking just ten minutes to begin with. In fact, this is a long time if you’ve never done anything like this before. In the same way that the body needs to be trained to run marathons, so the mind needs to be trained to sit for longer periods of time. The story also illustrates the danger of waiting for the meditation to finish. It’s a common experience and it’s almost as though we think that by simply sitting there and not moving, we’re meditating, no matter what we’re doing with the mind. But this underlying sense of expectation, of waiting for something to happen, is a mind that is looking to the future, as opposed to a mind resting in the present. Think about it, how can there ever be a sense of ease resting in the present moment if the mind is hurriedly trying to get to a space and time in the future?
Take10 – introduction
Having spent some time looking at how best to approach meditation (and how to avoid some of the most common mistakes), it seems only fitting to turn our attention to the technique itself. Some aspects of this ten-minute exercise will appear quite familiar, as they’re similar to the short two-minute exercises you’ve already done. Although by now you might be itching to get started, I’d strongly recommend that you read the following section in full before you sit down to do Take10. While the first page may appear to have all the necessary information, it is in fact just a summary – a useful list of the key points to remember. You might like to have this near you the first few times you do the meditation, just in case you forget the order of things. But remember you can also access the guided version by visiting the website at
www.getsomeheadspace.com/headspace-book/get-some-headspace
What follows the summary is a more detailed explanation of the four sections. The first section is just taking care of the practicalities and getting yourself ready. The next section is about taming that wild horse, bringing the mind to a natural and comfortable place of rest. Following that is a short section where you’ll be focusing on the rising and falling movement of the breath and then freeing your mind altogether while you just sit back and enjoy the silence. Finally, there is the part when you make the conscious effort to carry that sense of presence and awareness into your everyday life and into the relationships with people around you.
Take10 – summary
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.

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