Get Some Headspace: 10 minutes can make all the difference (14 page)

So without any effort to try and change the location of the breath, rest your attention on that physical movement, that rising and falling sensation. As you’re doing this, you can slowly begin to notice the rhythm of the breath. How does the breath feel in the body? Is it fast or is it slow? Take a good few seconds before you try and answer. Are the breaths deep or are they shallow? You can also notice whether the breath feels rough or smooth, tight or spacious, and warm or cool. These may sound like strange questions, but they follow that same idea of applying a gentle curiosity to your meditation. This process should only take about thirty seconds.

Having got a good sense of how those sensations feel in the body, now focus on the breath as it comes and goes each time. The easiest way of doing this is to count the breaths (silently to yourself) as they pass. As you feel the rising sensation count 1, and as you feel the falling sensation count 2. Keep counting in this way to the count of 10. When you get to 10, return to 1 and repeat the exercise. It sounds easier than it is. If you’re anything like me when I started, you’ll find that you count to 3 or 4 each time before your mind will wander off to something more interesting. Alternatively, you may suddenly find yourself counting 62, 63, 64 . . . and realise that you forgot to stop at 10. Both are very common and part of the process of learning meditation.

In the moment you realise that you’ve been distracted, that the mind has wandered off, you’re no longer distracted. So all you need to do is gently bring the attention back to the physical sensation of the breath and continue to count. If you can remember the number you were on then just pick it up from there and, if not, simply start again at 1. There are no prizes for making it to 10 (I’m sorry to say) and so it doesn’t matter whether you start again at 1 or not. In fact, it can be quite funny in how difficult it is to make it to 10 each time, and it’s OK to laugh if you feel like laughing. For some reason meditation can look very serious and it can be tempting to start treating it like ‘serious work’. But the more you can bring a sense of humour to it, a sense of play, the easier and more enjoyable you’ll find it.

Continue to count in this way until the timer you’ve set lets you know that it’s the end of the session. But don’t jump up from your chair just yet. There is still one very important part left to do.

This part is often overlooked and yet it’s one of the most important aspects of the exercise. When you’ve come to the end of the counting, just let your mind be completely free. Don’t try to control it in any way. This means not focusing on the breath, not focusing on counting, or anything else at all. If your mind wants to be busy, let it be busy. If it wants to be quiet and there are no thoughts at all, let it be quiet. It requires no effort, no sense of control or censorship of any kind at all, just letting the mind be completely free. Does that sound like a wonderful or a frightening proposition I wonder. Either way, just let your mind loose for about ten or twenty seconds before bringing the meditation to a close. Sometimes when you do this you may notice that the thoughts are actually less than when you were trying to focus on the breath. ‘How can that be?’ you may well ask. If you think back to the example of the stallion that hasn’t yet been broken in, he’s often more comfortable and more at ease when he has a bit of space, when he tends not to cause so much trouble. But when he’s tied up a bit too tightly, then he tends to kick a little. So if you’re able to bring some of this spacious quality into the part of the technique where you focus on the breath, then you will really start to see a lot more benefit from the meditation.

Having let the mind roam free for that short while, slowly bring the attention back to the physical sensations in the body. This means bringing the mind into the physical senses. Notice once again the firm contact between the body and the chair beneath you, between the soles of the feet and the floor, and between the hands and the legs. Take a moment to notice any sounds, any strong smells, or tastes, slowly grounding yourself through contact and awareness with each of the senses. This has the effect of bringing you fully back into the environment you’re sitting in. Gently open the eyes first and take a moment to readjust, to refocus, and be aware of the space around you. Then, with the intention to carry that sense of awareness and presence into the next part of your day, slowly get up from the chair. Be clear where you’re going next and what you’re about to do, as this will help to maintain that sense of awareness. Maybe it’s going to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, or perhaps it’s going back to the office to sit at your computer. It doesn’t matter what it is, what matters is being clear enough in your own mind that you’re able to continue experiencing each moment, one after the next, with your full awareness.

Researchers from the University of Montreal investigated the difference in brain responses of meditators and non-meditators when they experienced pain. The scientists found that the areas of the brain which regulate pain and emotion were significantly thicker in meditators compared to non-meditators. This is important, because the thicker the region, the lower the pain sensitivity. This potential for change in the brain is known as neuroplasticity. It means that when you sit to meditate, not only are you changing your perspective, but you could also be changing the physical structure of the brain.

In a randomized control study, researchers found that a mindfulness-based approach was more effective than medication in preventing the relapse of depression. Now clearly there are some situations when medication is required, but this study makes for interesting reading. In just six months, 75% of the mindfulness practitioners completely discontinued their medication. The researchers also found that they were less likely to relapse. Not only that, but they experienced an ‘enhanced quality of life’ compared to those on medication.

A Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School undertook a study to see if meditation could influence the healing of psoriasis, a treatable skin condition that has a strong relationship with psychological stress. With clear implications for other stress-related skin conditions, they found that the meditators’ skin cleared at about four times the rate of the non-meditators’ skin.

In a comprehensive analysis of thirty-nine different studies, researchers from Boston University examined how effective mindfulness had been in treating anxiety and depression in patients suffering from other illness. They found that meditation had a significant effect on the symptoms across a wide range of health disorders. The researchers concluded the benefits are so far-reaching because meditators learn how to work better with difficulties in general, and so therefore experience less stress in life.

A recent study from Oxford University, investigating the impact of stress on 274 healthy women aged between eighteen and forty, found that stress can reduce the chances of women conceiving. The head of the research team suggested that techniques such as meditation could be instrumental in combating this decline in fertility.

I’d always assumed that meditation was done sitting down with your eyes closed. So it was quite a shock when I turned up at one of my very first monasteries and was introduced not only to the cross-legged seated variety of meditation, but also to walking and standing techniques and even meditation done lying down. Now if you’re anything like me, you’ll already be thinking, ‘Oh yeah, the lying-down meditation’s the one for me!’ – though I’m sorry to say it doesn’t really work like that. Although you can still get a lot of benefit from lying down to meditate, your practice will be that much stronger if you can learn to do it sitting upright in a chair. These four types of meditation posture were not there to give us a choice as to how we’d like to meditate, but were an introduction to mindfulness. If you think back to the introduction, mindfulness simply means to be present, undistracted, in the moment, as opposed to lost in thought and caught up in the emotions. By learning how to
meditate
in all four postures (if you think about it, we’re always in one of them, if not in transition from one to the next), we were at the same time being taught how to be
mindful
in all four postures.

It may be tempting to think, ‘Yeah, but I bet the seated meditation is when the magic really starts to happen.’ So to give you some idea of how important these other postures are considered in the overall training of meditation, take the example of the daily schedule at this particular monastery.

We got up at 2.45 a.m. and started meditation at 3 a.m. We had breakfast at 5 a.m. and lunch at 11 a.m. and then one short tea-break in the afternoon. (In the tradition of this monastery, and indeed most other Buddhist monasteries, we didn’t eat after noon, so there was no break for dinner in the evening.) We finally went to bed at around 11 p.m. Now you’ve probably already done the maths, but this ensured a total of about eighteen hours of formal meditation practice every day. Of these eighteen hours,
half
were dedicated to walking/standing meditation, and the other half to sitting meditation, the sessions alternating one after the next.
That’s
how important they’re considered.

As for the horizontal meditation, alas, that was taught purely for the benefit of falling asleep (or if we were too unwell to meditate sitting upright). The idea of falling asleep in this way is that a certain amount of awareness can be maintained throughout the night if you’re lying in the correct position and maintain the right attitude of mind. In fact, there was such an emphasis placed on this, that the first question the teacher would ask me each day was ‘Did you awake on the in-breath or the out-breath this morning?’ It was a question to which at first I frequently shrugged my shoulders by means of a reply. Try it, it’s not nearly as easy as it sounds. With a bit of practice, though, you’d be surprised how quickly you can become aware of these details.

I remember vividly the first moment I realised the full implication of being mindful of the body in this way. As is often the way with meditation, it wasn’t during the formal practice but later on when I was walking along the road. Up until then I’d understood the concept of mindfulness, but hadn’t really appreciated the full potential of it. I was walking down the road, in the same way as you would normally, but applying the instructions for walking meditation (which you’ll find later in this book), when all of a sudden it hit me that in being 100 per cent present with the process of walking, with the physical sensation itself, I wasn’t experiencing any thoughts. If I was truly present with one thing, then I couldn’t be present with another at the same time. So, without trying to ignore or resist thoughts, they were naturally decreasing on their own as I focused my mind elsewhere.

At first glance this discovery may not sound all that extraordinary to you. In fact, it may sound quite obvious. But if it were that obvious, then surely we’d do it all the time, because it’s only when we’re caught up in all the thoughts that we get stressed. So for me it was the realisation that the mind can only be in one place at one time. Sure, sometimes it moves so quickly from one thing to the next that it gives the impression of being in more than one place at one time, but that’s just an illusion. The reality in that situation was that by placing 100 per cent of my attention on the physical sensation of walking, the mind was no longer lost in thought. I became quite excited about this idea, with visions of how wonderful my new life would be, always living in the present, never distracted by thinking. In fact, I got so carried away with it that within just a couple of minutes I’d lost all sense of awareness and was completely lost in thought again! As I said before, I think it’s best to think of insight as drips of water filling a bucket, rather than any great thunderbolt that might transform your life instantaneously.

Although it requires consistent effort to be mindful, just like the meditation technique, it’s an
effortless
type of effort that’s needed. The effort is simply remembering to notice when you’ve been caught up in thoughts or feelings and, in that moment, redirecting your attention to a particular point of focus. It doesn’t matter whether the point of focus is the taste of the food that you’re eating, the movement of your arm as you open and close a door, the weight of your body pressing against a chair beneath you, the sensation of water against your skin as you’re taking a shower, the sound of your heart beating as you exercise, the physical sensation of touch between you and your baby, the smell of toothpaste as you’re brushing your teeth, or even the simple act of drinking a glass of water. Awareness can be applied to every little thing you do – no exceptions. It can be applied to both passive and dynamic activities, indoors and outdoors, at work and at play, and alone or with others.

If you’re new to mindfulness then at first this may sound confusing. I regularly get asked by people whether that means they now have to walk down the street with their eyes closed while watching their breath. First of all, please don’t! You’ll probably walk out in front of a car. Second, we’re now talking about general mindfulness rather than a specific meditation, so there’s no need to close your eyes and no need to focus on the breath. Again, mindfulness means to be present, aware of what you’re doing and where you are. You don’t have to do anything differently from how you would normally do it. The only thing you need to do is be aware. And the easiest way of doing that is to have a point of focus. Every time you realise the mind has wandered off, you simply bring your attention back to that original focal point.