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

it’s very tangible, but you may well find that the mind still wanders a lot. If you do experience a very busy mind or a strong emotion of some kind, remember the idea of the blue sky, the possibility that perhaps underneath all those thoughts and feelings there might exist a place that is still, spacious and clear. So each time you realise the mind has wandered off and you’ve become distracted, just effortlessly move the attention back to the physical sensation.
    The wild horse
    Sometime later I found myself living in a much busier monastery, which served the needs of the local community and received a lot of visitors. We were still given many hours a day to meditate in a formal way, but the emphasis at this monastery was more on the practice of awareness in everyday life – in other words, the practice of mindfulness. Having previously had the luxury of moving seamlessly from one meditation session to the next, I’d grown accustomed to my mind settling quite quickly when I sat down to meditate. But now the sessions were often sandwiched between other activities, such as gardening, cooking, cleaning and paperwork. Often this involved working with others, having conversations and discussions about all sorts of things. Some of these conversations were monastic in nature and others were, how shall I say, less monastic. What I discovered very quickly was that this type of interaction made for a very different type of meditation session afterwards. Rather than sitting down and the mind immediately settling as it had before, it was now often very busy.
    Falling back into my old habits of trying to control the mind (never underestimate the strength of this tendency), if my mind hadn’t settled within five minutes or so, I started to resist the thoughts. And in resisting them I created yet more thoughts. I’d then panic about the fact that I was creating more thoughts and in doing so create even more thoughts!
    I was fortunate enough to have a very experienced teacher on-hand again, and so went to ask his advice. He was known for his warm and often humorous teaching style and rarely answered a question with a straightforward answer. In fact, he would often answer a question with another question! But when he did answer, it was almost always in the form of a story, of which just like the previous teacher, he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply. I explained my difficulties as he sat listening, slowly nodding his head.
    ‘Have you ever seen a wild stallion broken in?’ he asked. I shook my head. What had that got to do with anything? He seemed a little disappointed, but then I guess life on the Tibetan steppes as a child is somewhat different from growing up in a small English village. He continued to talk about these wild horses, which he said were very difficult to catch and even harder to tame. ‘Now, imagine you grab hold of one of these horses and try to keep it in one place,’ he continued. I imagined standing next to the horse, holding on to it tightly with a rope. ‘Impossible!’ he blurted out, ‘no man or woman can hold down a wild horse, it’s too strong. Even if you got together with all your friends you’d never be able to hold it down in one place. This is not the way to tame a wild horse. When you first catch one of these horses,’ he continued, ‘you need to remember that they are used to running free. They’re not used to standing still for a long time, or being forced against their will to stay in one place.’ I started to get a sense of where he might be going. ‘Your mind is like this wild horse when you sit to meditate,’ he said, ‘you can’t expect it to stay still in one place all of a sudden just because you’re sitting there like a statue doing something called meditation! So when you sit down with this wild horse, this wild mind, you need to give it lots of room. Rather than trying to immediately focus on the object of meditation, give your mind time to settle, to relax a little.