Read Online Get Some Headspace: 10 minutes can make all the difference by Andy Puddicombe - Free Book Online

really uncomfortable.
    But it was the next bit of his story that really resonated and that I hope will stay with you too for a long time to come. ‘In order to get to this monastery you must have flown in a plane?’ he asked, knowing full well what the answer would be. I agreed. ‘Was it cloudy when you left?’ he asked. ‘It’s always cloudy in England,’ I replied, smiling. ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘you’ll know that if you get in a plane and fly up through the clouds, there’s nothing but blue sky on the other side. Even when it appears as though there’s nothing but big, dark, heavy clouds, there’s always blue sky there.’ There was no denying it, I’d flown a lot over the years and he was right. ‘So,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders, ‘the sky is always blue.’ He chuckled to himself as though everything I ever needed to know was in that one sentence, and in a way it was.
    I returned to my room and thought about the significance of what I’d heard. As a concept I got it: the sky is always blue. The clouds are our thoughts and when the mind is very busy with all these thoughts the blue sky is temporarily obscured. In my own case, the mind had been so busy with thoughts, and for such a long time, that I’d almost forgotten what blue sky looked like. But it was more than that. It was this idea that the underlying essence of the mind, like the blue sky, is unchanging, no matter how we feel. When we’re in a bad mood or feeling rough for some reason, then the cloud is simply more obvious, more distracting. There might be just the one thought in the entire sky, but it seems to demand every last bit of our attention.
    The reason this lesson was so important for me – and I hope will be for you – was that I’d always assumed I had to somehow create blue sky. I was under the impression that to experience headspace I needed to make something happen. The truth is, we don’t need to create anything. The blue sky is headspace, and it’s always there – or, rather, here . This changed everything for me. Meditation was no longer about trying to create an artificial state of mind, which I’d imagined headspace was. Neither was it about trying to keep all the clouds at bay. It was more a case of setting up a deckchair in the garden and watching as the clouds rolled by. Sometimes the blue sky would peek through the clouds, which felt nice. And, if I was able to sit there patiently and not get too engrossed in the clouds, then even more of the blue sky would start to appear. It was as if it happened on its own, with no help from me whatsoever. Watching the clouds in this way gave me perspective, a sense of space that I’d not known in my meditation before. More than that though, it gave me the confidence to sit and rest my mind in its natural state, not trying, not doing, just being.
    Of course, it’s all very well me telling you this, but until you experience it for yourself it may not sound all that significant. But take a moment to imagine what it would be like to have that kind of freedom and space in your mind. Imagine what it would be like to be unconcerned with the volume or intensity of thoughts in your mind. Most of all, imagine what it would be like to have a place within your own mind which is always calm, always still and always clear; a place that you can always return to, a sense of being at ease or at peace with whatever is happening in your life.
    Exercise 3: physical sensations
    Put the book down for another couple of minutes and try this short exercise. We return here to the idea of being at peace with whatever is on your mind. Whereas last time you were focusing on sounds or visual objects, this time try focusing on a physical sensation. It can be the sensation of the body pressing down on the chair beneath you, the soles of the feet against the floor, or even the sensation of your hands resting on the book. The advantage of focusing on the physical sensation of touch like this is that