Title: The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness
Author: Andy Puddicombe
Rating: ★★★★☆
Review:
For a long time, I categorized meditation and all its benefits for people’s mental health as voodoo science along with essential oils curing cancer. However, meditation has gained traction over the past few years and that is partially due to meditation apps like Headspace. Headspace is so popular that it even has several series on Netflix. Intrigued, I picked up this book written by the founder of Headspace. I was impressed at how well Puddicombe explained abstract concepts with stories and metaphors from his meditation teachers. I also like that in addition to research studies, he included tales from his clinic.
In one of the tales from the clinic, Puddicombe talked about how one of his clients had problems doing the Take10 (ten minutes of meditation) consistently. He suggested that she write down in her journal the reason why she couldn’t meditate for ten minutes that day. She ended up meditating every day because the reasons would be so trivial that she would rather meditate for ten minutes than write down the excuses. This tip actually helped me a lot. I ended up doing the ten minutes session almost every day for the past two months. While I don’t feel significantly different, I do enjoy the ten minutes I get to sit and do nothing.
I think the only complaint I had about the book was the exercises sprinkled in between chapters. Since the book was the first time I was exposed to these meditation techniques, I had to read the entire exercise and then go back and actually do each step the exercise instructed. After doing the exercise, I had to reread the previous paragraph in order to get back on track. Thus, the exercises felt like rude interruptions. There were also times when I didn’t really want to do the exercise, so I ended up just skipping over those sections.
Notable Quotes:
- “The kind of happiness that I’m talking about is the ability to feel comfortable no matter what emotion arises.”
- “Meditation isn’t about becoming a different person, a new person, or even a better person. It’s about training in awareness and understanding how and why you think and feel the way you do, and getting a healthy sense of perspective in the process.”
- “Have you ever noticed how much emphasis some people place on even the smallest amount of difficulty in their lives, and how little time they spend reflecting on moments of happiness?”
- “It can sometimes feel as though we’re so busy remembering, planning and analyzing life, that we forget to experience life—as it actually is, rather than how we think it should be.”
- “Even when it appears as though there’s nothing but big, dark, heavy clouds, there’s always blue sky there.”
- “The body and mind are not separate. When we have presence of mind we have presence of body, when we possess mental focus we possess physical focus, and when we have an ease of mind we have an ease of body.”
- “By changing the way in which you see the world, you effectively change the world around you.”