My experience of mindfulness meditation
Although I describe headspace in great detail and have also used their logo, I am in no way affiliated to them. I have just used their services for very long and have collected enough information to help others make a decision about it. C’mon, you believe your fellow ‘The Office’ fan, don’t you?
Before I started meditation, I too looked on the internet for helpful tools and since I couldn’t afford a personal trainer, I tried many different apps which I have mentioned in the article below. They all are definitely worth a try. I tried to include everything that I thought that other sources of information lacked when I was searching for knowledge. Hope you enjoy!
It has now been over a year since I started using the headspace app. Although to be completely honest, I have been on and off of it and have broken a streak many a times. My highest was a 20 day streak but then I missed the next day.
Anyways, now that I have told you that I wasn’t very disciplined in my meditation practice, especially at the beginning, I am going to tell you what I experienced, how you can experience it too and some ways that made the feeling a whole lot better for me.
It was one of those days when I was just randomly surfing on YouTube. I had nothing better to do in that phase of my life (just two years ago actually). Before the main video started playing, there was an ad by headspace. It was an animated feature, one of those that goes (paraphrasing), “ Sometimes meditation can be easy, other times it can be quite difficult…”. So naturally, I skipped the ad. But I kept seeing it here and there on YouTube.
I was usually averse to meditation. My dad tried to get me to meditate 6–7 years back when I was in 7th grade but I just couldn’t. It was boring, tough and felt unnecessary. Later in life i came to realize that it wasn’t really just my fault but that the method of meditation my dad followed was a terrible one which was uncomfortable from the beginning. I never tried to find out whether he had learnt it from somewhere or not but it felt forced to me. Nowadays when I meditate, I get into an effortless flow and then it’s easy to navigate. The time I sat in front of my dad, I literally had to force all my concentration in one particular spot in the middle of my forehead where he asked me to try to find a light. And me being the naive boy I used to be, sat there bursting a vein, trying to find a literal light in my forehead while sitting in a really uncomfortable position. I never tried it again…until 5 years later.
After spending two years of my junior college (11th and 12th grade) in a terribly managed, overpopulated, harsh, unhealthy hostel ( at least it was fully air conditioned! — from 11 pm to 12 pm ) and then joining an engineering college, my mind was getting saturated with a lot of useless thoughts and unnecessary voices running around. I started reading extensively in my second year of engineering and watched some personal growth videos too ( Charisma on command — YouTube channel — if you ever want to check it out). One thing that seemed common in every personal growth topic was meditation. So, finally, I decided to give it a try.
Meditation is of many types. Some are really strict while some are comfortable from the very beginning. The comfortable ones is what I started with because I wanted to ease into the practice, not exhaust myself out before it even began. The first ever meditation that I completed was a video called “The 6 phases of meditation” by Vishen Lakhiani. It’s freely available on YouTube and the app Omvana and it’s a really powerful guided meditation although it is 20 minutes long. I was not able to keep up with it everyday because I was not in the habit of it.
Guided meditation definition from Wikipedia —
Guided meditation is a process by which one or more participants meditate in response to the guidance provided by a trained practitioner or teacher,either in person or via a written text, sound recording, video, or audiovisual media comprising music or verbal instruction, or a combination of both.
So then I eventually turned my attention to headspace. I still practice 6 phase meditation but since I am still not very comfortable doing it everyday, I randomly go to it when I am in the mood.
After exploring many wonderful apps like Omvana, simple habit, headspace and some more YouTube videos, I decided to stick with headspace. Its not to say that the other apps are any less in comparison but I just liked the feel of headspace more than the others, so it’s just a personal preference. Omvana had much less material and I went through it pretty quickly. Simple Habit was wonderful too and I completed many of its exercises. I still go to those other apps whenever I feel like changing things a little bit. I would advise trying each and every app mentioned above and going through their free exercises at least.
Headspace uses something called as mindful meditation. Mindfulness, basically, means awareness. Awareness of one’s own body and awareness of the surroundings. Awareness of the thoughts within our mind. If you think this is all pretty easy and you already are very aware of everything, then just try shifting your attention to your breath right now. Feel your body in contact with the seat or the ground and listen to the sounds around you. Feel how your breath travels inside the body. You will notice a difference when you try this. You will notice a hush, a silence that you probably only seldom feel. Even in these situations, the mind is too loud. Through mindfulness, we become aware of the thoughts and judgments that instinctively arise in our mind and, instead of losing ourselves in the thoughts, we learn to let them go. We learn to be at peace and still be aware of our outside and inside. Have you ever been caught off-guard by the lecturer or your friend before you went for the kill against the giant red dragon of Darios, slashing your big iron sword made from the gems collected from the eight kingdoms? (No? Am I the only one imagining such otherworldly scenarios?) Or maybe you snapped out of your daydream yourself? And then realized that you missed an important part of the lecture ( or in a worse case, an important meeting ) imagining things that could wait? Mindfulness will help you through these cases where you can be aware of your mind getting lost during crucial moments and then you can signal it to wait and pay attention. You can always write down what you are daydreaming about and save it for later, but you can’t (and shouldn’t) sacrifice the present moments.
Here are the first two lines of Wikipedia’s definition of mindfulness —
Mindfulness is the psychological process of bringing one’s attention to experiences occurring in the present moment, which one can develop through the practice of meditation and through other training.
I know that some people are skeptical of the real benefits of meditation and in particular, the apps they are trying, and I understand that because I used to be doubtful too. But, I think most of the doubt about meditation can be removed by googling actual research papers instead of blogs or articles ( yep! Don’t trust me…trust the science) and as far as the research and science behind headspace is concerned, here is the link to that :
Headspace has really been a wonderful tool for me. I began with just the 2 basic packs that every user gets for free (at least that’s what we get in India) and I kept repeating those two packs for 2 months. The packs included 10 guided meditation sessions each. The sessions are of 3/5/10 minutes as per the user’s choice. After a while, as I grew comfortable with it and I was confident that I would continue this practice even if I had to force myself sometimes, I subscribed to it with a monthly subscription charge of INR 120 and am right now planning to shift to the annual subscription which is much cheaper ( INR 74 per month). Even the basic packs are enough to get you started on the journey of mindfulness or clarity and after that you can move on to in-person meditation training ( it is actually better than apps, according to none other than Tim Ferriss, not to say that apps are bad but the physical training is just better if you can afford it and if you can find a good, certified personal trainer…….remember my dad’s case?) or you can explore other options including apps and YouTube videos.
