Get Some Headspace: 10 minutes can make all the difference (13 page)

This section is all about preparing yourself for meditation in the right way. You’d be amazed at how many people rush around like crazy and then quickly sit down and close their eyes, waiting for the mind to be quiet. How’s that ever going to work? If you’re busy in your mind beforehand, then it will take that much longer for the mind to quieten when you sit to meditate.

If you can, start to slow down five or ten minutes beforehand so that you begin the exercise in the right frame of mind. Make sure you’ve set the timer if you’re using one and that you’ll be left undisturbed for the next ten minutes. While it’s best to learn meditation sitting upright in a chair, you may feel that you’d rather do it lying down. This may sound more appealing, but it’s a lot more difficult to get the right balance of focus and relaxation when you do it lying down and you may well find yourself drifting off into sleep. If you
do
choose this option, make sure you lie on a firm surface with the arms and legs out straight. You might also like to place a pillow under the knees to take the pressure off your lower back.

This next phase is about bringing the body and mind together. Think how often your body is doing one thing and yet your mind is off doing something else. Perhaps you’re walking down the street, but your mind is already at home, planning the dinner or wondering what’s on television. It’s actually very rare that the body and mind are together at the same place and the same time. So this is an opportunity to settle into your environment, to be consciously aware of what you’re doing and where you are.

Ideally, ‘checking-in’ should take about five minutes to begin with. As you get more familiar with the process and more skilled, then you may find it doesn’t take quite so long, but it’s important not to rush this part. Some people approach checking-in with the idea that it’s just an optional preparation and not part of the actual exercise. They might think, ‘Right, let’s get this bit out of the way so I can get on to the real stuff, focusing on my breath and slowing down this crazy mind.’ But the mind doesn’t work in this way. Think back to the wild horse analogy and that idea of giving it all the space it needs to begin with, rather than trying to pin it down immediately in one place. Checking-in is all about bringing the horse into a natural place of rest.

Begin with the eyes open. Not staring at one particular thing, but rather looking forwards with a very soft gaze, aware of your peripheral vision too – above, below, and to either side. Then take five deep breaths, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. As you breathe in, really try to get a sense of the lungs filling with air and the chest expanding. And as you breathe out, just let the breath go. You don’t need to forcefully exhale, but just let the breath go and imagine that you’re letting go of any tension or stress you might have been holding on to. As you breathe out for the fifth time, you can gently close your eyelids. You can then allow the breath to return to its own natural rhythm, in and out of the nose.

In closing the eyes you’ll immediately become more aware of physical sensations and, in particular, the way in which you’re sitting. Are the shoulders slumped forward? Are the hands and arms being fully supported by the legs? This is a good opportunity to adjust these things before you get too far into the exercise. Next, bring your attention to the physical sensation of the chair beneath you and the weight of the body pressing down on it. This is the feeling of the contact between your body and the chair. Notice whether the weight falls evenly down through the middle of the body or whether you feel it pressing down a little more to one side. Now do exactly the same with the feet, simply noticing the sensation between the soles of the feet and the floor. Where is the point of contact strongest? Is it on the heel, the toe, the inside or the outside of the foot? Pause here for just long enough to be clear about this feeling. And then, lastly, repeat this process with the hands and the arms. Feel the weight of gravity, the weight of the arms being supported by the legs, and the contact of the hands on the legs. You don’t have to
do
anything about it, being aware of it is enough. Simply shift your attention to each sensation and remember to apply a sense of gentle curiosity.

As you’re doing this there will undoubtedly be lots of thoughts popping up in the mind. This is perfectly normal and you don’t need to do anything to try to change it. They’re just thoughts. Think back to the road analogy. The idea is not to try and stop the thoughts, but rather to step back and just allow them to come and go with your full awareness. Besides, at this point we’re paying attention to the physical sensations rather than any thoughts or emotions, so you can just allow those to come and go in the background.

Take a moment to notice any sounds. These might be very close to you, or perhaps in another room, or even outside the building. It might be the sound of cars passing by, people talking, an air-conditioning unit. It doesn’t matter what the sounds are, you can just witness them coming and going. Sometimes you might catch yourself getting ‘involved’ in a sound, perhaps tuning into a conversation. This is quite normal, and in fact as soon as you realise you’ve got caught up in one particular sound, then you will start to notice all the other little sounds again. If you live in a busy city, external sounds are often seen as a kind of obstacle to meditation, something that gets in the way of a quiet mind. But it doesn’t have to be that way. To begin with, it’s preferable if you can sit in a quiet room, but by making a conscious effort to acknowledge the sounds, rather than resist them, something very interesting begins to happen. You can repeat this process with your other senses if you like, just briefly noticing any strong smells, or even tastes you may have in your mouth. In this way the mind is fully engaged with the physical senses.

The next thing to do is to build up a picture of how the body
feels
. Start by getting a general sense of any areas of tension or relaxation. We’re not trying to change any of the feelings at this point, but rather building up a picture. This first scan might take just 10 seconds or so. It’s as if you were surveying a house from the outside only. But then you need to go into the house and get a bit more detail about the condition of the building. So, in order to do this, next take a good thirty seconds or so to scan down through the body (from the top of the head, down to the toes), noticing how the different parts of the body feel. What feels comfortable and what feels uncomfortable? Where are the areas of tension and where are the areas of relaxation? As you’re doing this it’s tempting to zoom in and focus only on the areas of tension. In fact, sometimes it might even feel as though there is nothing
but
tension! But try as much as possible to work systematically, scanning down the body, noticing both comfort and discomfort. Don’t forget to notice the fingers, the toes and the ears. How do they feel?

As you’re scanning you may become more aware of your thoughts and feelings, even though you’re not specifically focusing on them. Just allow these to come and go in the background. As soon as you realise that you’ve been distracted, that the mind has wandered off, just gently bring your attention back to the body scan, back to the place you left off from. This is normal and will probably happen many, many times, so it’s nothing to worry about. If you do notice a particularly strong emotional quality to the mind, then it can be useful simply to acknowledge it.

We’re usually so caught up in our thoughts, so busy with the activities of the day, that we’re often unaware of how we’re feeling emotionally. This may not sound that important, but if you’re aware of how you feel then you’re in a position to respond to that feeling. Whereas if you are unaware, you will in all likelihood find yourself reacting impulsively at some stage during the day. We’ve all observed it – the mild-mannered businessman or housewife, seemingly well adjusted, standing calmly in line at the supermarket, and then suddenly losing it. Perhaps they get bumped by a trolley, or maybe their card is declined at the till, things that on another day they would brush off, but because of that underlying feeling, it all boils over and ends up in some kind of outburst.

People often say they haven’t got a clue how they feel and that’s OK too. Being aware that you haven’t got a clue is still being aware, and the more times you repeat the process of checking-in, the more you’ll become aware of an underlying feeling or mood. The emotional feelings are treated no differently to the physical sensations in this particular exercise. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an emotion that you perceive as pleasant or unpleasant, comfortable or uncomfortable. For the purpose of this exercise, no analysis or judgment is required whatsoever. It’s enough simply to notice the feeling, to acknowledge it and be aware of it.

Finally, while it’s not absolutely necessary, you might also find it useful to briefly (I’m talking five to ten seconds here) acknowledge any particular issues that you might have going on in your life. It might be that you’re feeling excited about an upcoming event, or perhaps feeling anxious about a meeting you’ve just had. Perhaps you’re feeling angry about a conversation you had with someone, or feeling happy about some praise you just received. Whatever it is, acknowledge it and be aware that it’s around. If it’s been taking up a lot of space in your mind recently, then it’s almost inevitable that it will pop up during the exercise at some stage. By being clear about this at the very beginning, then you are setting up a framework in which those thoughts can arise and fall away again, without getting sucked back into thinking about them.

As I say, this entire process of checking-in should take about five minutes to begin with, and if you only have five minutes to spare, then only do this part of the exercise –
that’s
how important it is. Without going through this process, there’s very little benefit to jumping ahead and focusing on the breath. So make sure you take your time with this section. Although checking-in is part of the meditation itself you can make good use of it in lots of other situations too. You can use it sitting on the bus, at your desk, or even standing in a queue. You might like to make the deep breaths a little more subtle, and if you are standing up then you will probably want to avoid closing your eyes. But otherwise you can do the exercise in the same way and still get to experience that same sense of ease in the mind.

Once we’ve brought the ‘horse’ to a natural place of rest, it may continue to fidget a little, or start to get bored. So we need to give it something to focus on. As I’ve said, the breath is one of the easiest and most flexible of objects to use, so for the purpose of this exercise the breath will be the primary focus.

Begin by taking just a few moments (about thirty seconds) to observe the breath, in particular the rising and falling sensation that is created as the breath passes in and out of the body. At first, simply notice where in the body you feel that sensation most strongly. It might be in the abdomen, around the diaphragm, in the chest, or even in the shoulders. No matter where you feel it most clearly, just take a moment to notice the physical sensation of the breath rising and falling in that way. If the breath is very shallow and hard to detect, you might find it helpful, and even reassuring, to place your hand lightly on the abdomen over the area just below the belly-button. You can quite easily trace the rise and fall of the stomach as your hand moves back and forth. You can then return the hand to its initial position, resting in the lap, before continuing the exercise.

Because the breath and mind are so intimately connected, it’s possible that you might not be happy with the location of the breath. That may well sound very strange to some of you, but it’s actually a very common phenomena. People often complain that they are not ‘breathing properly’, that they can only feel the movement in their chest. And yet, they say, they’ve read books and been to yoga classes where they’ve been instructed to take big deep breaths from the stomach. At first glance this makes sense, we naturally associate the times when we’ve been very relaxed, perhaps feeling sleepy on the sofa, or lying in the bath, with long, slow breaths, seemingly coming from the stomach. Equally, we associate times of anxiety or worry with short, shallow breaths, seemingly coming from the area of the chest. If you sit down and experience the feelings similar to that anxious type of breathing, then it’s natural that you might think you’re doing something wrong. But you’re actually doing nothing wrong at all. Remember, there is only aware and unaware, undistracted and distracted – there is no such thing as wrong breathing or bad breathing in the context of this exercise. Of course, there are specific breathing exercises that might be part of yoga or some other tradition, but that’s not where we’re going with this exercise.

If you’ve made it to this point in your life and are reading this book right now, then I’m assuming you’ve breathed perfectly well up until this point. In fact, I would guess that unless you’ve done previous exercises with relaxation or perhaps yoga, most of the time you won’t even have been aware of how you’re breathing. The breath is autonomous, it doesn’t require our control in order to function. Left alone to its own natural intelligence, the breath generally functions quite comfortably. So, rather than trying to exert your control (notice a theme building up anywhere here?), allow the body to do its own thing. It will regulate itself in its own time and its own way. Sometimes it might appear more obvious in one place and then shift as you’re watching it. At other times it will rest quite comfortably in the one place the entire time, whether that’s the stomach, chest or someplace in-between. Your only job here is to notice, to observe, and to be aware of what the body is doing naturally.