Get Some Headspace: 10 minutes can make all the difference by Andy Puddicombe Read Free Book Online Page A

while. That’s where the meditation comes in, sitting down each day and without actually taking the car for a ride, you sit there and allow the engine to tick over at its own comfortable pace while you listen to it chugging away, becoming more familiar with how it sounds and how it feels. This is the practice .
    But then what good is a car if you never take it anywhere? And it’s the same with meditation. 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 life. This is the integration .
    This means there are two different ways of using meditation. One is the ‘aspirin’ approach, as I like to call it. We go out, lead busy lives, get stressed, need something to make us feel better afterwards, and so do some meditation. Feeling better, refreshed, we then go out again, lead busy lives again, get stressed again, until we once more need something to make us feel better. There’s nothing wrong with this approach – in fact, you may well get considerable headspace from it, but it’s limited when compared to the second approach, which works to integrate that same quality of mind into the remainder of your life.
    The amount of time most people are able to dedicate towards the practice of seated meditation is but a fraction of the day. The great thing about applying mindfulness to the rest of the day is that it doesn’t require you to take any more time out, or to change your schedule in some way. In fact, you can just keep on doing exactly what you had planned. The difference is not in the activity, but the way in which you direct your mind while doing those things.

The Approach
    Meditation and thoughts
    When I set off for my very first monastery, I was convinced that meditation was all about stopping thoughts. I’d heard about this ‘quiet empty mind’, which could supposedly be achieved through meditation, and I was desperate to taste it. Sure, I’d had a glimpse or two over the years, but I imagined it as something never-ending, a bubble in which there was nothing but space, and through which nothing unpleasant could enter. I imagined it as a place that was free from thoughts and feelings. I’m not sure how I ever imagined it was possible to live without thoughts or feelings, but this is how I approached meditation from the beginning. But trying to create this bubble, to achieve this state of mind which I’d assumed I needed to reach to be meditating ‘properly’, is probably one of the most common misconceptions about meditation.
    I received some excellent instruction during this time, but the style in which it was delivered only served to reinforce many of the erroneous ideas I had about it. Each day I’d visit the teacher and explain how my meditation was going, and how there were all these thoughts racing through my mind that I couldn’t stop no matter what I tried. And each day he’d tell me to be more vigilant, to try harder to catch the thoughts the moment they arose in the mind. In no time I became a nervous wreck. I’d sit ‘on guard’ hour after hour. It felt like the mental equivalent of the ‘whack-a-mole’ game you find in a fairground, constantly waiting for the next thought to arrive so that I could jump on it and extinguish it.
    With eighteen hours of meditation every day and just three hours or so for sleep, it wasn’t long before I’d exhausted myself completely. I’d sit there in the temple straining to achieve something. Anything. But with every extra ounce of effort I moved further away from that which I was seeking. The other monks from the local area looked perfectly relaxed. In fact, there were a few who seemed to regularly nod off. Now while that’s obviously not the purpose of meditation, when you’re forcing it as much as I was, the idea of sleep was positively dreamy.
    After a little while my teacher realised that I was putting in too