Get Some Headspace: 10 minutes can make all the difference (5 page)

And this is how most people live their lives, moving from one distraction to the next. When they’re at work they’re too busy, too distracted, to be aware of how they really feel, so when they get home they’re suddenly confronted by lots of thoughts. If they manage to keep themselves occupied during the evening, then they may not even become aware of these thoughts until they go to bed at night. You know how it goes, you put your head on the pillow and it appears as though the mind suddenly goes into overdrive. Of course, the thoughts have been there all along, it’s just that without any distractions you become aware of them. Or it can be the other way around. Some people have such busy social lives or family lives that it’s not until they get to work that they become aware of just how frazzled they feel, of all the thoughts racing around in the mind.

All these distractions affect our ability to concentrate, perform and live at anywhere near our optimum level. Needless to say, if the mind is always racing from one thought to the next, then our ability to focus will be seriously impaired.

How did you find it? Were you able to focus on it quite easily, or did you find your mind kept wandering off with other thoughts? How long did it take before you got distracted? Maybe you found you were able to maintain a vague sense of awareness but were thinking about other things at the same time. As unlikely as it may sound, for many people focusing on an object for even one minute is quite an achievement. When you think how long you need to focus on your work, or looking after your family, perhaps listening to a friend, or even driving a car, only being able to focus for such a short period of time can be quite a worry.

As if we didn’t already have enough ways of avoiding what’s going on in our minds, we now have e-mails and social media routed to our mobiles so we can be
truly
distracted all day. As convenient as that may be, it means that now even the slightest feeling of boredom or restlessness is a trigger to get online and keep busy. Take a moment to think about it. What’s the first thing you do each day? Is it checking your e-mails? Perhaps sending messages on Facebook, interacting with friends or work colleagues through Twitter? And what’s the last thing you do at night before going to sleep? If the research is accurate, then there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll be doing at least one of these things at either end of the day, if not all of them. It’s pretty hard to switch off when you’re permanently plugged in.

I read a story in the newspaper about a man who’d become so addicted to technology, so terrified that he might miss something important or perhaps offend someone by not replying to them, that he’d taken to sleeping with his smartphone on his chest. Not only that, but he also took his laptop to bed with him and slept with it by his side – actually
in
the bed. This is a married man (at least at the time of writing) who shares the bed with his wife. The irony is that he had such a flood of electronic data flowing into his life, that despite taking his computer to bed, he still managed to somehow miss an e-mail in which he was offered $1.3 million for his company that he’d put up for sale. This may be an extreme example, but pretty much everyone I know complains of feeling overwhelmed by the amount of electronic data in their life. When I was living as a monk I used to think ‘well just turn it off, don’t use it’. But living out in the world and having now to embrace all these things in my own work, I can see that it’s not as simple as just turning it off or ignoring it. So instead of trying to stop or change it, we need to look at how we can relate to it skilfully and not feel overwhelmed.

That idea brings us back to the fundamental principles of training the mind. 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. There’s no need to give everything up, or radically change your lifestyle in any way. Dramatic changes like this are rarely sustainable, which is what makes a mindful way of living so achievable. You can keep living as you always have done, if that’s what you want to do. Mindfulness is about learning how to change your
experience
of that lifestyle. It’s about finding a way to live as you are, but with an underlying sense of fulfilment. And then, if you feel as though you want to make some changes, then of course feel free. The difference is, any changes you make will be sustainable.

The consequence of living such a busy life, with so many responsibilities and choices, is that our bodies and minds are constantly working overtime. Many people I know say that even when they’re asleep at night it feels as though the cogs just keep on turning. So it’s no coincidence that the rate of stress-related illness has increased at the same time as our lives have become more complicated. According to the UK National Office of Statistics, the prevalence of anxiety, depression, irritability, addiction and compulsive behaviour have all risen sharply in recent years, accompanied by all the usual physical symptoms of stress such as fatigue, hypertension and insomnia.

People come to the clinic where I work for all kinds of different reasons, but the symptoms of stress are by far the most common. Sometimes people come along without prompting, at other times they may get a nudge from their partner, family member or friend. Occasionally the symptoms are so bad that their doctor refers them. But mostly these are ordinary people looking to find a way to cope a bit better in life. Perhaps they feel under pressure at work, overwhelmed by family life, tired of obsessive thinking or consistently acting in a way that is causing themselves or others harm. Most of them are simply looking for a little more headspace in their lives. In fact, at the end of the book you’ll find case studies for some of these individuals, who’ve generously agreed to share their experiences.

Stress can make us do all kinds of funny things. It can lead to us saying things we wish we hadn’t, doing things we wish we hadn’t. It affects the way we feel about ourselves and the way in which we interact with others. Of course, a certain kind of stress or challenge can leave us feeling fulfilled, having achieved an objective. But too often it tends to spill over into the other (not so useful) kind of stress, and we are left wondering what life is about. This is where the importance of training the mind, of maintaining contact with this underlying sense of fulfilment and happiness no matter what’s happening in our lives, can make such a profound difference. This is what it means to have headspace.

Mindfulness will undoubtedly help you get some headspace and make a difference to your life. That’s probably why you are reading this book in the first place. But there’s another good reason for training in mindfulness. Because, whether we like it or not, we share the world in which we live with other people and, unless we want to live as a solitary yogi or hermit in the mountains, we’re always going to have to interact with others. So who benefits most from your increased sense of headspace? Is it you, or is it the people around you? It’s safe to assume that if you’re in a better place because you’re practising mindfulness and doing your meditation each day, then you’re going to interact with others in a more positive way as well.

This is perhaps the most neglected aspect of mind training. When meditation came from the East to the West, for some reason it quickly became about ‘me, myself and I’. While this was perhaps inevitable at first, it’s important that we now, as time goes by, have the intention to make it a more altruistic type of training. My guess is that you probably struggle most in life when you are focusing on your own problems, because that’s what we tend to do as humans. We like to obsess, ruminate and analyse endlessly. OK, so we don’t actually
like
doing it, but it can sometimes feel impossible to stop it. 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 to obsessing about your own problems. There’s a shift in persepective. 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 only that, but the mind becomes softer, more malleable, easier to work with. It tends to be quicker to settle on the object of meditation, less easily distracted by passing thoughts. It also tends to be clearer, more stable and less reactive to volatile emotions. So giving your practice an altruistic edge is about so much more than simply doing the right thing.

It should come as no surprise that the impact this simple skill can have on your relationships with others is quite profound. In becoming more aware of every
thing
and every
one
, you inevitably become more aware of others. You start to notice how sometimes you might unintentionally (or even intentionally) push their buttons, or notice what causes them to push yours. You start to listen to what they’re actually saying, rather than thinking about what you’d like them to say or what you’re going to say next. And when these things begin to happen you’ll notice that your relationships with others really start to change. But so long as we’re immersed in our own thoughts the whole time, it’s very difficult to truly find time for others.

Traditionally, meditation was never practised alone. It was always part of a broader system of mind training. More specifically, meditation was just one part of three key aspects. The first part of the training would be understanding how to
approach
the technique. This means discovering the dynamics of the mind and how it’s likely to behave when you
practise
the technique. Only then would you be introduced to the actual meditation techniques. But there was a third aspect too. Having gained a sense of familiarity with the technique, the emphasis would be on the
integration
of that quality of mind into everyday life. In the rush to bring meditation to the West, two of these aspects have been largely neglected. And without those two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, the essence of meditation is lost. It becomes something isolated from its original context and therefore less effective. It also has considerably less impact on your everyday life. So perhaps it’s no surprise that people have struggled so much with meditation over the years. For meditation to really work, to get the very best from the techniques, it’s vital that all three components are present: how best to approach the techniques, how best to practise the techniques, and how best to integrate the techniques.

No one aspect of this jigsaw is more, or less, important than the next. Imagine you’re given a beautiful classic car to look after. Now you’ve never driven a car before, never had any lessons, and the car is so unusual, so rare, that you’re not even too sure what all the different pedals, levers and buttons do. The approach to meditation is like learning how to drive the car. You don’t need to understand all the mechanics under the bonnet, but you need to know how to operate the various pedals, levers and buttons. You’ll also need to get used to the power of the car, your positioning on the road, and of course to the unpredictability of all the other cars around you. This is the
approach
.

But this is no ordinary car, it’s a classic car, and so it requires that the engine is turned over on a regular basis in order for it to remain healthy, and for it to work at its optimum capacity next time you want to take it for a drive. If you’re not familiar with classic cars then this might sound a little strange, but it’s just what these old engines need once in 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.