Get Some Headspace: 10 minutes can make all the difference (24 page)

It would be easy to dedicate an entire book to the ways in which you can best support your meditation practice, but I’ve suggested here what I consider to be just a few of the most important, in the hope that they’ll help strengthen your practice of mindfulness in day-to-day life. Needless to say, the theme that runs throughout is one of awareness, an understanding of both oneself and others. It’s about developing a gentle curiosity: watching, noticing and observing what’s happening in every aspect of your life – how you act, how you speak, and how you think. But remember, it’s not about trying to be someone else, it’s about finding a sense of ease with you as you are, right now.

For meditation to be effective it doesn’t really matter how you view your life. But it can be useful to acknowledge the general theme, because that way you can be more alert to the tendency to slip into negative patterns of thought. And it’s this increased awareness that provides the potential for sustainable change.

It’s also useful to notice how your perspective can shift – how one day you can get on a crowded train and not be too bothered about it, and yet on another occasion it appears to push every button you have. The good thing about this realisation is that clearly it’s not what’s happening
outside
of ourselves that causes us the most difficulty, but rather what’s going on
inside
our own minds – which, thankfully, is something that can change. Noticing these shifting perspectives from day-to-day, and from moment to moment, can be a very strong support for your daily meditation.

If you want to find a greater sense of happiness through the practice of meditation, taking out your frustrations on others is unlikely to encourage a calm and clear mind. Communicating skilfully and sensitively with other people is therefore essential on the road to getting some headspace. This could mean applying a greater sense of restraint, empathy or perspective to your relationships – or maybe all three!

That said, there are some people who, no matter how well intentioned
you
are, will still choose to pick a fight. In these situations there is often little you can do. Trying to empathise with them and recognise those similar states of mind within yourself can be helpful, but if someone is consistently unpleasant towards you, then it might be best to just stay well clear – if you possibly can that is.

Have you ever noticed how much emphasis some people place on even the smallest amount of difficulty in their lives, and how
little
time they spend reflecting on moments of happiness? Part of the reason for this goes back to the idea that happiness is somehow ‘rightfully ours’, and that everything else is therefore wrong or out of place.

The idea of taking time out to be grateful may sound a little trite to some, but it’s essential if we want to get some more headspace. It’s very difficult to be caught up in lots of distracting thoughts when there is a strong sense of appreciation in your life. And by developing a more heartfelt appreciation of what
we
have, we also begin to see more clearly what’s missing in the lives of others.

When you’re kind to someone else it feels good. It’s not rocket science. It feels good for you and it feels good for them. It makes for a very happy, peaceful mind. But whilst you’re at it, how about showing yourself some of that kindness – especially in learning to be more mindful. We live in a world with such high expectations that we can often be critical of our own progress in learning something new.

Fortunately, meditation has a strange way of bringing out the kindness in people – and practising kindness in everyday life will simply feed back into your meditation. Kindness makes the mind softer, more malleable and easier to work with in your practice. It creates a mindset that is less judgmental and more accepting. Clearly this has profound implications for our relationships with others.

Compassion is not something that we can ‘do’ or ‘create’, it already exists in each and every one of us. If you think back to the blue sky analogy, the same principle applies to compassion. In fact, you could say that the blue sky represents both awareness and compassion in equal measure.

Sometimes compassion will arise spontaneously, like the clouds parting to reveal the blue sky. At other times we might have to make a conscious effort, which is a bit more like
imagining
what the blue sky looks like, even when it’s obscured by clouds. But the more you imagine this scenario, the more likely it is to happen naturally. Compassion is a lot like empathy really, putting ourselves in the shoes of another and experiencing a shared sense of understanding.

Life is not unlike the sea, ebbing and flowing throughout our lives. Sure, sometimes it’s calm and serene, but at other times the waves can be so big that they threaten to overwhelm us. These fluctuations are an inevitable part of life. But when you forget this simple fact, it’s easy to get swept away by strong waves of difficult emotions.

By training the mind through meditation it’s possible to develop a more balanced approach, so that you experience a greater sense of equanimity in life. This shouldn’t be confused with a boring existence where you float along in life like some emotionless grey blob. In fact it’s quite the opposite. Having greater awareness of your emotions means that, if anything, your experience of them will be heightened. It’s just that in being less caught up in them, you will no longer feel as though you’re at their mercy.

No matter how fortunate your circumstances, life can at times be both stressful and challenging. We often try to ignore this fact and therefore feel frustrated and disappointed when we don’t get our own way. Much like compassion, it can be useful to think back to the blue sky analogy when you reflect on acceptance.

With that in mind, the journey to acceptance is about discovering what we need to let go of, rather than what we need to start doing. By noticing moments of resistance throughout the day, you can start to become more aware of what prevents acceptance from
naturally
arising. This in turn will allow you to view the thoughts and feelings that arise during your meditation with a much greater sense of ease.

For many people, life has now become so busy, so hectic, that a sense of impatience is perhaps inevitable. In these moments, you may notice your jaw tightening, your foot tapping, or your breath getting increasingly shallow. But by
noticing
the impatience with a genuine sense of curiosity, the very nature of it begins to change. Somehow the momentum slows down and its grip is released.

Impatience is just as likely to show up in your meditation practice as it is in everyday life – one simply reflecting the other. In fact, if you’re like most people you may well find yourself asking, ‘Why am I not experiencing results more quickly?’ But remember, meditation is not really about achievement and results – which is why it’s such a nice change of pace from the rest of life. Instead it’s about learning to be aware, to rest in that space of natural awareness with a genuine sense of ease.

Mindfulness is about a fundamental shift in the way you relate to your thoughts and feelings. While that may sound exciting, or perhaps a little overwhelming, it’s done by repeating the exercise little and often. So this means practising meditation on a regular basis, no matter how you feel. Like any other skill, you’ll become more confident and familiar with the feeling of mindfulness the more often you apply it.

By practising in this way – little and often – you can slowly start to build up a stable sense of awareness in your meditation, which will naturally feed through to the rest of your life. Likewise, by being more mindful in everyday life, it will have a positive impact on your practice. If you’re really clear in your motivation, knowing why you’re learning meditation and who those people are around you that are likely to benefit from your increased sense of headspace, then you’re unlikely to have trouble sitting down for ten short minutes each day.

Living skilfully can mean having the presence of mind to restrain yourself when you think you might say or do something you’ll later regret. It can also mean having the strength and stability of awareness to respond sensitively to difficult situations rather than reacting impulsively. So living skilfully requires a certain amount of discriminating wisdom.

Unfortunately, wisdom can’t be learnt from a book, no matter how profound the writing. Instead it relates to an
experiential
understanding of life, which meditation can help to enhance. In the same way that compassion and acceptance are reminiscent of the blue sky analogy, so too is presence. Because wisdom isn’t something you can ‘do’ or ‘make happen’ – it’s there in all of us. By becoming more familiar with that space within ourselves and trusting our instinct more fully, we can then learn to
apply
this quality of discriminating wisdom in everyday life. In short, we can begin to live more skilfully in the world.

James is married with three children. He’s a successful businessman and, although he works hard, he enjoys a good lifestyle. So it might surprise you to learn that James came to the clinic because he was suffering from anxiety. It’s easy to forget that what we see on the surface is often very different to what’s going on inside.

James explained how much he worried. He would worry about his wife going off with someone else; about his children getting injured; he would worry about the health of his parents; about his business and the people working for him. And he would worry about himself too. In fact, he frequently visited the doctor and used the internet to try and determine what disease he might have at any given time.

He said people were always telling him how lucky he was, what an amazing life he had, so how could he explain that he was in a constant state of anxiety. Likewise, how could he explain that having everything so good only made him more nervous, because he had that much more to lose. He said that just thinking about the anxiety made him anxious. He would then start to feel guilty, as though he was stupid for feeling that way and would worry that he might be losing his mind.

The idea of meditation occurred to James after he saw something about it on television. He said that although it seemed a little ‘out there’, he was willing to give anything a go. Needless to say, he came to the clinic with many of the usual preconceptions about meditation, assuming that it was all about trying to stop thoughts and clear the mind of any unpleasant feelings. But he also came with an open mind and a willingness to embrace something new. In fact so much so that soon he was looking for any opportunity to apply the techniques. He applied mindfulness to his exercises at the gym, to eating his lunch, and even just sitting with the baby. He also quickly built up a daily practice of about twenty minutes.

Although enthusiasm doesn’t always define the result, in James’s case it seemed to make a big difference. Over time I watched as he became increasingly relaxed about the way he felt. We worked on a number of techniques, some of them generic and some specific to anxiety. Most of the focus was on how James
related
to his anxious thoughts. He had always seen them as a ‘problem’, something to ‘get rid of’ and he’d built up so much resistance to the thoughts, that he was battling them pretty much the entire day. It’s a common reaction, but by resisting these feelings James was not only creating tension, but also exacerbating the situation by treating the thoughts as something tangible.

So it came as quite a surprise to James when I asked him to meditate less on the anxiety itself, which when left alone has a tendency to just come and go in its own time anyway, and instead focus on his
resistance
to the anxiety. After a little while he started to notice how his obsession with trying to control the anxiety was actually driving the anxiety itself. As he became increasingly aware of this tendency, so the situation started to unravel a little.

This didn’t immediately stop the feeling of anxiety, but it did the change the way he related to it. Slowly, he gave up struggling to get rid of the thoughts and allowed the feelings of anxiety to flow a little more. During those few months I noticed that James started to find some humour in it all and not take himself or his thoughts too seriously. In fact he even started to share a few of these thoughts with other people. To his surprise his wife responded with relief, saying she’d always assumed that he was so ‘sorted’ and that she was the ‘crazy’ one. Knowing that he experienced these feelings too somehow took the pressure off a bit. He even made a couple of jokes about his anxiety with his friends in the pub.

I bumped into James recently. As expected, his enthusiasm for the meditation had kept him going and he was still sitting every morning. He said that although he still felt worried in certain situations, it didn’t bother him in the same way. He no longer identified so strongly with the feeling of anxiety. Most importantly, he said he was no longer fearful of worry, which meant he didn’t need to expend huge amounts of time and energy in trying to get rid of the feeling. The irony of it all, he said laughing, was that ever since he’s stopped fighting the feeling, it didn’t seem to come and visit quite so often.

Rachel came to the clinic because she had started having difficulty in sleeping. She’d seen her GP who had prescribed sleeping pills that Rachel was reluctant to take.