Get Some Headspace: 10 minutes can make all the difference (23 page)

There are a few things you might like to consider before committing to a particular time of day to take your ten minutes. Perhaps you tend to wake feeling groggy in the morning, or are always in such a rush that you can’t imagine doing it first thing. Or perhaps you get very tired towards the end of the day and know that meditation will inevitably end in sleep if you leave it until the evening. Maybe you have a quiet space at work that you are already eyeing up, thinking you could perhaps squeeze it in at lunchtime. We’re all very different and it’s important that you find a time that is comfortable for you and that works for you. However, there’s one time to avoid if you can, and that’s straight after lunch. The body tends to feel very heavy around this time of day, busy with the digestion process, and it is all too easy to fall asleep. This can be the same after a heavy evening meal too.

I’m often asked what I would recommend as the best possible time of the day, and I always answer the same way. No matter whether you are a lark or an owl, the best time of the day to do your meditation when you are learning is first thing in the morning. One of the most practical reasons for this is that it tends to be a quiet time of day, when other people in the house are still asleep, so it’s easier to find a quiet spot to sit undisturbed. It’s also an opportunity to allow the grogginess of the night to clear away, leaving you refreshed and in a good state of mind to approach the day ahead. But probably the most important reason is that if you do it in the morning, it gets done. Leaving it until later in the day can be a dangerous strategy as other commitments, deadlines or interruptions crop up. And if you leave it until you get home from work, you may well feel as though you just want to slump on the sofa, as if even the idea of meditation seems too much. In fact, I’ve even known people get stressed about trying to fit in their meditation. It keeps getting added to the next ‘to do’ list, only to be ‘not done’. So the very thing that they set out to learn to reduce their stress has somehow become a further source of stress. This is not the way it was intended!

The idea of finding time early in the morning can be daunting. But keep in mind that we are still only talking about ten minutes. And this is ten minutes that is going to set up your entire day for you. We may feel desperate for more sleep, but the deep rest experienced in meditation is far more useful and beneficial than the extra ten minutes of sleep you would otherwise get. What’s more, you’re conscious of it.

It’s for you to decide when is best, but give yourself the best chance to make this work by choosing a time that is realistic, when you know that you’ll be able to do it on a daily basis.

Many people say they feel that setting a timer is the very antithesis of meditation. ‘How can you get any headspace when you are under pressure to do it in a set period of time?’ But this is maybe not the most helpful way of looking at it. There are practical reasons for using a timer. It’s not uncommon to fall asleep during meditation and so it’s important you’re woken up when you originally intended to finish (especially if you need to be at work on time). There’s also the issue of knowing how long you’ve been sitting there for – sometimes a minute can feel like ten minutes, and at other times vice versa. But there’s one final reason which is perhaps the most important of all.

When it comes to meditation, every day is different. One day you might find that your mind is very quiet, at other times it might be very busy. Sometimes there may be no particular emotion around, whereas at other times you might feel an emotion very intensely. Now when you feel calm and relaxed I’ve no doubt that you’ll be able to sit and meditate comfortably for ten minutes. In fact, you may even decide, after sitting for ten minutes, that you’re enjoying it so much, you’re going to make it a twenty minute session instead. In contrast, if your mind is busy and you feel irritated about something, you may well find that after just a couple of minutes you think there’s no point in continuing and decide to quit there and then.

If the purpose of meditation is to know one’s own mind, then with this approach you’ll only ever get to know the happy and calm aspects of the mind, and never the more troublesome aspects. This may sound quite appealing at first, but when was the last time you had a problem with feeling too happy or too relaxed? So it’s the troublesome thoughts and emotions that we need to get to know the best. In order to know your own mind, and therefore experience life with a renewed sense of perspective, it’s important to always cross the finishing line, to complete the ten minutes, no matter what. By the same measure, on those days when you’re feeling great, as though you could continue for ever, it’s best if you stop when the timer goes off. This way you’ll develop a very honest and useful practice. Of course, if you want to repeat the exercise later in the day, then do, but continue to follow the same ten minute rule to begin with.

As a final note, try to find a timer that is not going to make you jump when it goes off. One man I know bought a cooking timer for this purpose and then experienced heart palpitations every time it went off. You might find a nice gentle alarm on your mobile phone. Just ensure that the phone is turned over so that you can’t see the screen, that it’s switched on to silent, and that the vibrate function is also switched off. The temptation to look to see who has just called or texted might just be a little too much to resist if you don’t do those three things first. You might also like to choose an alarm that is different to the one you use to wake up to in the morning. People have particular associations and even strong feelings of aversion to that sound, so it might be best not to make it part of your daily meditation.

Meditation is a skill and, like any skill, needs to be repeated on a regular basis if it’s to be learnt and refined. There is something about the momentum that builds up when you sit to do it every day which simply cannot be replicated. It’s the same when starting a new exercise programme. It requires a regular commitment to build up enough momentum for it to become part of your daily routine, almost without needing to think about it. By doing it at the same time each day, it helps you to develop a very strong and stable practice.

Neuroscientists investigating the benefits of meditation and mindfulness reiterate the importance of repetition in their findings. They say that the simple act of doing the exercise day after day is enough to stimulate positive change in the brain. In fact, they consider this vital in establishing new synaptic relationships and neural pathways. What this means is that new patterns of behaviour and mental activity can be created and, just as importantly, old patterns of mental activity can be let go of. As so much of our mental activity is habitual, the implications of this are nothing short of life changing. The research also showed that it didn’t even matter whether the experience was perceived as positive or negative by the meditator, the same beneficial effects in the brain were still recorded. So even when it feels as though it might not be going so well, something positive is happening. No matter how you might feel on any particular day, try to repeat the process, for it’s through this repetition the foundations are laid for more headspace in the future.

If you do miss a day once in a while, don’t let that be the reason to give up meditation altogether. Use it as an opportunity to strengthen your resolve, to practise your resilience, and to be adaptive to changing circumstances. You will still see benefits. As a client recently remarked, ‘It’s hard to say exactly what the benefits are. All I know is that on the days I do it I feel great, and on the days I don’t do it, I feel rubbish.’ Start to notice how you feel when you do it, and also how you feel when you are forced to miss it for some reason.

People often say to me that while they appreciate the concept of remaining mindful throughout the day, or even stopping to take out ten minutes for a meditation exercise, they find it hard to remember to do it. For one reason or another the day just seems to pass them by and before they know it they are lying in bed, just getting ready to fall asleep, when they suddenly remember that they forgot. Then they feel guilty about not doing it, assume that they are hopeless, and decide that maybe meditation is not for them. Before you go down that route, here are a few things to consider.

Part of the skill in learning meditation is remembering to do it, being conscious enough, awake enough, to realise that now is the time that you have put aside to practise. Don’t be surprised if you forget a few times to begin with, it’s quite normal to do so. But it underlines the importance of having a set time of day when you always do it. My guess is you rarely forget to brush your teeth or have a shower in the morning, or to eat your dinner and watch your favourite television programme in the evening, right?

Taking ten minutes can be achieved by finding that same slot in the day’s schedule, but remembering to be mindful throughout the day can be a little more challenging. In fact, at Headspace events we even hand out small round stickers for people to put on their phones, computers, cupboard doors and so on, to remind themselves to be mindful and aware throughout the day. There’s nothing on the sticker, so it doesn’t mean anything to anyone else, but to those people it’s a reminder to be present. If you think it might help, you could do something similar to help you remember.

The thing with meditation is that it’s difficult to quantify or judge. As I mentioned earlier, there really is no such thing as good or bad meditation, just aware or unaware, distracted or undistracted. So if you were to judge it would have to be on that basis. But don’t feel you have to rate it compared to another session or, even worse, against someone else’s experience – meditation is just what it is.

Trust your own experience and don’t just rely on other people’s opinions. This is part of making meditation a practical reality in your life. To paraphrase one very famous meditation teacher, don’t just do it because I say it works. Try it for yourself and see if it makes a difference for you. Do it consistently and honestly and be the judge of whether it made any difference. If it did, you’ll have a little more confidence in continuing to do it and perhaps even doing it for a little longer each day. If it doesn’t seem to make a difference, give it some more time. Doing it just once or twice is like switching on the kettle when you are trying out some new coffee. You need to at least wait for the kettle to boil, to pour out the water and taste the coffee, before you can really say whether it works for you or not. This is why I usually recommend doing it for a very minimum of ten days before you completely rule it out.

It’s very common to feel slightly agitated or restless when you first sit down to meditate and it’s useful to think back to the analogy of the wild horse in these situations. If you’ve been busy doing other things, or have simply been thinking a lot, the mind is unlikely to immediately sit still. It will have built up a certain amount of momentum that will take a few minutes to settle down again, and it’s only natural to experience that movement of mind physically as well as mentally. So remember the idea of giving the mind space and allowing it to come to a natural place of rest in its own time, just as I described earlier.

As you move towards the end of your meditation session (no matter how long you are sitting for) you might begin to experience some discomfort. You might notice how this happens on one day and yet not on another, and it’s worth being aware of these changes and looking to see if the physical pain reflects the state of the mind in any way. You might also like to refer back to ‘The Reversal’ story on page 50 as this is a great way of dealing with discomfort of any kind. Now unless you have a severe back problem, then sitting in a chair for a short while should present no real physiological challenges. That said, for most people it is quite unusual to sit still without any distractions and so inevitably you will become aware of little niggles and discomfort in the body that you wouldn’t usually notice. The important thing to remember is that those areas of discomfort were already there before you sat down. All the meditation has done is shine a light of awareness on them so you can see them more clearly. At first this sounds like bad news, but in fact it’s actually very good news because we need to see these things clearly before we can let go of them. So it’s almost as though by witnessing the discomfort coming to the surface, you are witnessing its departure. Needless to say, if you experience chronic or acute pain of any kind it is best to check it out with your doctor. But whatever you do, don’t let mild discomfort be an excuse not to meditate because you just never know when headspace might strike.

Whether it’s through the forum on our Facebook bookpage (check out
www.facebook.com/HeadspaceOfficial
), or in the diary at the back of this book, it can be really helpful to record your experience of meditation when you start out. Otherwise the experience can quickly be lost and mixed up with other feelings both before and after the meditation. This is not about judging in a ‘marks out of ten’ way, but rather recording your findings in a ‘what I saw when I went for a walk’ way.

And remember, it’s not necessarily about seeing an increasing amount of focus and clarity every single day. It’s about noticing whatever is happening in the body and mind each time you sit down to meditate. Simply witnessing this transition, day after day, can in itself lead to a more relaxed way of seeing things, a greater willingness to accept and be part of change. We tend to identify very strongly with being a certain type of person, but when you do this exercise honestly, it makes you realise that actually we are much more than that one type of person. We’re always changing, one moment to the next, one day to the next. And when you see this clearly, it becomes more difficult to hold on to any fixed views of how you see yourself. The result is a feeling of more freedom, of no longer needing to follow the same habitual patterns or cling to a certain identity.