by Nick Duerden
When I first considered learning to meditate this time last year, the practice still seemed stuck in the ’70s, and was viewed accordingly. But something curious has happened over the last 12 months. Suddenly mindfulness is everywhere, and everybody seems to be doing it, many proclaiming remarkable results. In another year, it will have reached saturation point, and the newspapers will be full of stories of potentially harmful side effects (the result, largely, of endless self-appointed practitioners who don’t really know what they are doing, or how best to train people in it), but right now it is the thing to do, and then recommend to your friends.
The man partly responsible for its initially quiet, now emphatic, rise is Professor Mark Williams, a clinical psychologist who worked at Oxford University and whose research centred around the treatment of depression. He appears to be the quintessential Oxford don, learned and studious, and nothing at all like a guru. But mindfulness actually originated in the United States several decades previously, the brainchild of one Jon Kabat-Zinn. He was a professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who developed it as part of a stress reduction programme. In its essence, mindfulness is ‘the quality or state of being conscious and aware of something’. It is about focusing not on what happened yesterday or tomorrow, in half an hour’s time or later tonight, but rather – much as Eckhart Tolle espouses – on what is happening now. It is about accepting your feelings, and your thoughts, and your bodily sensations, and how when you take a step back from something, you get to view it dispassionately, objectively, not subjectively. Everything can change as a consequence. So, when you drink a cup of coffee, don’t just drink it, but feel the cup in your hand, its handle, the sensation of your lips on the rim, the drink itself on your tongue, in your mouth, your throat, its journey towards your stomach. As it is being served, notice your barista. Is she Polish or Czech? Eye colour? And now feel the chair you are sitting on, its fabric, the position of your elbows on the armrests, your feet on the floor. What about outside? Is the sun shining? Are the clouds cirrus or nimbus? What time is it, the hour, the minute, the second? How many carrier bags is she carrying? What did he just say? And so on and so on, extrapolated to all areas of your life that are happening in the present tense, the now.
I am beginning to see what Claire had meant: this will be hard.
Professor Williams is a skilled guide, though, and his meditations require neither Muzak nor sound effects, nor even an exaggerated voice that strives for equanimity by softening the consonants and elongating the vowels. Instead, he speaks normally. But then he does have the advantage of a wonderfully soothing voice. He sounds like an Open University lecturer, everything slow and effortlessly modulated, the Queen’s English as it used to be before the 21st century arrived to ruin everything. I can tell he has a beard before Google confirms it; he probably has elbow patches on the jackets he wears.
‘Each breath is unique,’ he intones in the meditation I access free via Spotify. (Spotify clearly doesn’t know quite how to classify him. Related artists, according to the site, include Dame Shirley Bassey and Martine McCutcheon.) Williams has a variety of meditations available here, their only real difference being length, one 10 minutes, the next 20, the final 40. Convinced I have something to prove, I plump for the 40.
Sympathetically aware that by three minutes in, some of us might be losing the will to continue, he readily concedes that our minds might well have wandered, because this is what minds do. When this happens, we simply bring our focus back again, as often as necessary.
I somehow survive the 40 minutes, and it feels like an accomplishment. Before I know it, I am doing two sessions a day, 80 minutes of sitting still. I do not find the meditation particularly easy, as Claire had predicted, but something about it feels right, and good. Every time I do it again, I am glad to have done so. Nevertheless, I am aware of a certain Achiever Type pattern running here: I am meditating because I have been told it is good to meditate. Therefore, the more I meditate the more likely it will be I get better, and quicker.
The trouble for me is that my mind never does fully settle, and there is always so much going on up there that I become increasingly convinced I’m doing it all wrong, and that it could be having little or no effect.
After one session, I make a note of all the things I remember had crossed my mind during it, and even as I write them up, I am confident I must have forgotten at least 70 per cent of my pointless wanderings. I thought about my children, and looked forward to when they would be home. I found myself rewriting an earlier email to an editor, then about rewriting the rewrite, and so I did so, word for word. ‘Best’, or ‘Best wishes’ at the end? ‘All best’? I mentally tweaked the opening paragraph of an article I was writing about a TV programme, then drifted off to think about another, Boardwalk Empire, a new series of which was starting soon. And then everything else came in a messy, vaguely connected synaptic rush. Steve Buscemi, Graves’ disease. Chocolate, coffee. How many pages left of the book I’m currently reading, and what will I read next? The fridge, how empty the fridge is. Need to stock up. Sometimes the mind wanders for a little while, sometimes for a long while. I’ll buy more noodles. I like noodles. Soy sauce. Now I am thinking about Japan, Tokyo to Osaka, the bullet train, and the way the ticket inspectors, white gloves on feminine hands, bow from the waist as they enter and exit each carriage. So polite. That email again. ‘All best, Nick.’ And using these stretches of silence to carry on the work by yourself.
I try to focus on the breath, the sounds from outside, the birds, the buses, the postman. But then I’m thinking about a specific postman, the profoundly deaf one who doesn’t know his own strength and who hammers on our door first thing in the morning, waking us with a terrible fright.
And on and on it goes, one errant thought bleeding into the next and the one after that, an endless swirling carousel, my brain incapable of any kind of focus, much less of stillness for peace.
I failed all my exams at school the first time around. This had surprised me then. It doesn’t now.
The nagging sensation that I might be doing it wrong prompts me to contact an expert in the subject, Dr Danny Penman, who co-authored with Williams Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World, a book that is on its way to becoming a modern bookshelf staple. It has sold a million copies since its publication in 2010, and has been translated into 30 languages.
Dr Penman speaks to me about stress, how everything boils down to stress in the end, whether we are conscious of it or not. ‘Meditation is all about easing anxiety and stress,’ he says. ‘It manifests itself in everybody in different ways, but it’s all linked, ultimately. Anxiety, cold sweats, panic attacks, depression, insomnia, exhaustion, fatigue – it all points to a disturbed mind, a disturbed way of approaching the world. Put too much pressure on it, and you begin to crack in so many different ways. What mindfulness is fantastic for is putting things into context, and in doing so, reducing that stress.’
He tells me that if we manage to remove the stress we are feeling, then our body will speed up the process of healing and revert back to its optimal state. Stress simply retards the optimal state and helps keep us ill, sick, chronic. Meditation can be used not just to calm the mind, but is also great for other things, like pain relief.
Mindfulness, he tells me, is all about acceptance. ‘Accept your flaws. Not in a fluffy, self-indulgent, wallowing-in-your-own-problems kind of way, but just accept that you are human, that you suffer like everybody else, and that sometimes life is good and sometimes it’s bad. That’s just the way things are. Acceptance of the situation you are in is hugely important.’
This is something I have not done yet.
I ask him if it is possible to do meditation wrong.
He smiles. ‘You are not doing it wrong if you approach it in the right spirit. If the mind is constantly hopping around, then don’t worry. It’s what our minds were designed to do: to collect information. So that’s quite normal
. The fact that you notice your thinking, and begin to notice the thought process itself – that is the meditation. That flicker, that moment of awareness: that’s meditation. You are consciously aware of thoughts bubbling up, observing them, not being lost in them. This is where the benefits of meditation occur.’
It is the nature of the human mind to race and gallop along, he says. ‘If somebody tells you not to think of a white bear, under no circumstances think of a white bear, then you will immediately start thinking of a white bear: why is it there, what is its significance? Instead, just observe each thought as it arises, then allow it to drift past your consciousness. Your mind will naturally begin to still, and benefits will gradually accrue.’
I interject here. I want to know about the gradually bit. How long, I ask, until you become aware of the benefits?
‘Over time, your mind will become less fevered,’ he replies. ‘Your stress levels will begin to decline, and your body will begin to repair itself more efficiently. You will become healthier.’
Yes, but—
‘Don’t intellectualise. Just let it happen.’
I ask whether it is necessary that meditation be painful. I have read that many people choose to go to ashrams and spend 10 days kneeling on a hard floor in search of inner peace, often enduring considerable discomfort along the way. I tell him I sit on an Aeron chair, in tilt mode. Is that okay?
I am reassured by his answer. ‘People in the East kneel or squat because that is how they have sat for centuries. For them, it’s comfortable. In the West, we tend to sit on chairs. So if you want to sit, or lie down, fine. Just don’t fall asleep. It’s far more important to be relaxed while meditating than to be in any kind of discomfort.’
Finally, I ask whether he has ever found it boring, this tauntingly slow process of sitting still, doing nothing, while life races on around you, without you.
He laughs. ‘Well, I’d argue that it’s no more boring than brushing your teeth. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest meditation is something you actively enjoy, it’s more something you do because of the benefits it brings, and the clarity of thought. So if you are a little bored, that’s fine. Just stick with it.’
In his book Get Some Headspace: 10 Minutes Can Make All the Difference, Andy Puddicombe writes: ‘This is meditation, but not as you know it. There’s no chanting, no sitting cross-legged, no need for any particular beliefs . . . and definitely no gurus.’
If the current craze for mindfulness has a poster boy, then it is almost certainly Andy Puddicombe. He is a fortysomething former monk and, he claims, circus trainer, a handsome man who boasts fine bone structure and an Abercrombie & Fitch dress sense, and is always photographed smiling widely. Do Headspace and you can smile too, seems to be the suggestion. The New York Times has said he is ‘doing for meditation what Jamie Oliver has done for food’, a quote money can’t buy, and this has helped his book become a global bestseller, as well as its accompanying app sensation that now allows everybody to meditate on the go. Headspace was launched in 2010. At the time of writing, it boasts well over a million subscribers.
A friend introduces me to Headspace, approximately six months before Puddicombe starts to become the toast of the broadsheets, in which profiles on him claim his company is now worth somewhere in the region of £25 million. No wonder he smiles so much.
The Headspace website, with its bright colours and pretty layout, is appealing. It has something inclusive about it that makes each new visitor feel like a member of its special club. While you sit before your PC or tablet in preparation to meditate, for example, a little box onscreen tells you how many people are also using it alongside you. The first time I do it, at 1.30 on a Wednesday afternoon, 1,873 people have also set their sandwiches aside in favour of a little quiet time. A year later, that figure will be over 10,000.
Puddicombe himself is the guide, and he sounds pretty much the way he looks, and he looks very can-do, the kind of man who knows how to put up a garden shed without fuss. You trust him. He tells you to close your eyes, to breathe deeply, to count your breaths. And that’s it. At the end of the 10 minutes, he is genial, matey. ‘So, how was it?’ he asks.
It’s very good. I do it for several weeks, then several more. I contact Dr David Cox, then (but no longer) Headspace’s chief medical officer, for more information. I ask him about the sudden rise of mindfulness, and he tells me there is little mystery to it.
‘It is the right antidote at the right time,’ he says. ‘Everybody these days is talking about society being affected by hyper connectedness, 24/7 working patterns, social media, people being addicted to their phones. And the scientific community is beginning to realise that this is having very specific effects on people, particularly in the Western world. We have developed a reduced attention span, a reduced ability to focus. There are various emotional impacts that come from this.’
Cox is a former NHS doctor who quit after the stress of the job was compounded by the fallout from his father’s death. ‘Things were starting to get pretty heavy,’ he says, ‘which led to me starting to look for different ways to deal with all this stuff.’ He developed an interest in mental health, and came across Puddicombe’s work. Puddicombe was himself keen to bolster the credibility of meditation within the modern world, and promptly employed Cox as chief medical officer. Since leaving that job, Cox has become involved in academic research and finding convenient ways in which meditation can be implemented into the workplace.
He tells me that we have lost our ability to disconnect, to fully take time out for ourselves. We are fearful of switching off, of missing out (within a year of us talking the acronym FOMO – fear of missing out – will have made it into the Oxford English Dictionary), and we need to be constantly updated irrespective of how much this might drain us.
‘Evolution is a wonderful thing, of course, and we will adapt, but we’ve been around for 100,000 years or so, and evolution happens on a very slow timescale. But what’s happening to our society now is happening very quickly. It’s 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, and our brains are struggling to cope with the way we are living our lives now. Yes, we have it easier than people had it before, in terms of ease of access to shelter, to safety, to food, but we are being bombarded with information in many different ways, at incredible speeds. We have never experienced this before, and our brains are struggling to cope.’
There are some who might challenge this, rubbish it even. Not all of us, after all, fall ill because of our smartphones, our tablets, and not all of us register such a severe depletion of energy simply because we are on all the time. But Dr Cox insists that it does deplete us all, every one of us. It wears us down, and affects us in all sorts of ways, whether we realise it or not. ‘And this is why we increasingly hear from so many people who say it takes some kind of physical or psychological shock to occur before they start to look outside their normal boundaries and do something to help themselves.’
A recent Harvard study revealed that the average adult spends 47 per cent of their waking hours with their attention not on what they are doing, but elsewhere. This means that almost half our lives pass us by while we are lost in thought, worrying about the past, fretting over things that haven’t happened yet.
‘The whole concept of being in the present moment, having your attention in the here and now, is an interesting one,’ Cox tells me. ‘Our psychology is designed to scan into the future and look for possible danger. When anything has happened, we access our memory banks and look into the past to see whether we have ever been in a similar situation. What happened then? What was the outcome? That was a very powerful tool, and still is, evolutionarily speaking, but what it means is that we don’t spend a lot of our time paying attention to the here and now.’
The point of mindfulness, says Cox, ‘is to take that little step back and not get quite so emotionally bound up in thought’.
This is why mindfulness has proved so successful in dealing with depression.
‘It
doesn’t necessarily change your thinking,’ says Cox, ‘and we’re not trying to take away that evolutionary impulse. But what mindfulness does is to give you a healthy distance from those negative thoughts so that you can be aware of them, you can watch what is happening. You learn to recognise when your thoughts have raced off into the future and you are busy catastrophising about something awful that might happen next week. Psychologists have a wonderful term: cognitive fusion. This means that you are absolutely bound up in the emotional content of your thoughts. You perceive them to be absolutely true, you are emotionally fused with that thought. Mindfulness teaches cognitive diffusion, the ability to take that little step back, and not be quite so emotionally bound up. This doesn’t mean we no longer have emotions, and you don’t experience anything less in the moment; it just means that you are able to appreciate what is going on internally as well as externally. You are never going to stop your mind from wandering off, and you don’t want to. You just want to learn to be aware of when it does.’
Mindfulness is not about entering into a trance state, he adds, which is good because not all of us have the focus of Buddhist monks.
‘Whether you reach a kind of trance state is not the goal here. Clearly many people do, but that’s not what we’re aiming for. It’s also not necessarily where you derive the most benefits from.’
I ask whether it is possible to do meditation wrong.
‘No. You are almost certainly doing it right. Why? Simply because you are trying to. It’s a slightly elusive thing, though. When you get it right, you don’t all of a sudden enter into another state of mind. You are simply trying to pay attention to the here and now.’
This all sounds good and encouraging, I say, but there are so many competing meditation practices out there. Which is the best? Which should I choose?
‘You know you are doing the right one when you try it, you like it, and you keep doing it,’ he says.
I do it every mid-morning, or else early afternoon. I never miss a day. I visit the website, check to see how many other people are doing it with me, and let Andy Puddicombe talk me gently into mindfulness. Afterwards, not immediately afterwards, of course, but afterwards in the sense that, post-meditation, my senses are freshly alert to any changes, any possible improvements, I sit and wonder about its mysterious effects. Am I any different? Are things a little clearer? Would I recognise it if they were? I am still in the novelty stage, it feels shiny and new, a gimmick, and I like it. I like to tell myself that if it isn’t noticeably working yet, it will tomorrow, or the day after. Maybe it is working right now, and I just don’t see it.