Seventy five days of Headspace
My husband and I were driving back from the airport one streetlight-soaked, shadowy and windblown night. A fight was brewing. We had had a parking ticket. I was tired and cross, he was tired and cross. I wanted to talk about my annoyance, but he was monosyllabic and his hands gripped the steering wheel a little tighter.
We were turning into our street now. A steep, downward tumble of apartment buildings all coloured in the same, orange, nighttime glow. I opened my mouth and started to press him about a money issue that needed sorting.
He exploded.
I exploded back.
Then something extraordinary happened. My chest heaved outward, as though inside were a vacuum and sucking in the exterior air were the only natural thing to do to redress the balance. Then it did it again. Air, flowing through my nose and mouth, blowing through the anger in my hand and tickling the fury in my belly.
My husband was still talking. Still angry, but my body had stepped in and overruled my head.
A voice came. I can only describe this voice as the self who observes my thoughts and feelings — the fractional, tiny portion that just watches everything I do, rather than lives it.
“I’m trying not to feel triggered right now,” it said, through me.
At that time, I had just completed fifteen solid days of meditation. I use an app, it’s called Headspace, and Forbes values it at $250m. Bill Gates is a fan. Sales of mental health apps — Calm, Petit Bambou, are forecast to triple in ten years.
It works through a series of guided meditations led by ex-Buddhist Monk Andy Pudicombe, lasting three, five, ten and twenty minutes. In a soothing, mellow twang, Puddicombe will talk to you about the topic of meditation (anything from resetting yourself for the weekend to low self esteem to procrastination) then you take several deep breaths, close your eyes, and concentrate on your breathing.
Every now and again Puddicombe will resurface, to nudge you into bringing your wandering mind back to the breath, then at the end he will gently remind you to come ‘back into your body’ and close with a few final words on your topic of choice to set you up for the day.
It’s surprisingly centering. The meditating experience for the beginner goes something like this: “breathing: mind wandering: remembering that mind has wandered: returning to breathing”, and this loop will repeat for the ten minute timer you choose.
As you continue to practice each day, you find that your periods of mind wandering decrease, and your stable focus on the meditation object (the breath), increases. As your focus on the meditation object increases, you start to see the subjects of your mind wandering (the faces of your abductors!) approaching, and rather than being kidnapped you salute them and return to the breath.
For around two years I have turned to the Headspace app as a painkiller. I still remember sitting on my bed, upset with the world, using the anger meditation and leaving it transformed. This is known as the ‘Advil’ usage: sporadic, but effective rescuer.
For the past 75 days I’ve been using it as the vitamin — for prevention, and this is where the magic happens.
I am happier
I have control over when I want to relax, and when I want to focus
I am kinder to myself, ergo, kinder to others
I am slower to anger
I know my thoughts better, and by recognising them, they have less control over me.
This is the mindfulness aspect of meditiation. If you are committed, day after day, to concentrating for ten minutes on a meditation object, your mind rewires to recognise the common disruptors. This doesn’t stop when the meditation finishes. Simply by recognising these thoughts as they arise, throughout the day, takes away their power, and frees you up to concentrate on something of your choosing.
There is far more to meditation than these simple observations. This is beginners’ meditation. But for beginners, there are rewards.
Going back to that windblown, unpleasant night with my husband. He was triggered, I was triggered. We could have had an unnecessarily long fight, both of us caught up in our miniature dramas of pain, rifling through all of the baggage that we checked into our relationship, bringing out the badly wrapped packages that we have already hurt each other with, unwrapping them again and spreading them all about. But we didn’t. We agreed to just go to bed and to talk about things when we were calmer.
