What did you do last Monday night? Eat dinner? Watch Eastenders? Stare longingly at the phone praying for it to ring? I went to a small attic room in Brixton to meditate for two hours with eight strangers.
It’s all part of my ongoing project to arrive at my 40s with my mind and body primed to perfection (last week I tried veganism, which turned out to be chewier than I expected).
Meditation, they say, can help you live in the moment, untangle an addled mind and create a Zen-like state of calm. That all sounded good to me, so I rolled my sleeves up and went in search of my inner peace.
Why meditation?
It seems so mellow, and with science dictating that my stress levels are set to go through the roof post-40, I figured a double-dose of mellow was probably in order. Shrines, soft cushions, little statues, the gentle bell ringing, shoes at the door, Buddhist monks. If this wouldn’t calm me down, what the hell would?
I’ve personally been aware of meditation for quite a few years (without trying it). Every so often my dad heads off to “retreats” where he can sit in silent contemplation for a couple of days before returning home refreshed and invigorated. And there was the time I burst in on a friend sitting cross-legged on the bathroom floor with his eyes closed, and we both reacted like I’d caught him frantically masturbating into the sink.
So – despite me finding myself as the only guy in my first class last Monday – it definitely has a male following, albeit an occasionally furtive, seemingly secretive/ashamed one. I suppose at some level it’s not the manliest thing in the world to spend twenty minutes of your day finding your spiritual centre. It’s all a bit meadowy, a bit Timotei advert. In closed-minded circles, it’s probably the equivalent of admitting that you play the harp.
I had a chat with Ed Halliwell, a Mindfulness teacher, who also used to be the Deputy Editor of FHM in the late 1990s when lads mag were riding the crest of an enormous wave. He has a really interesting book called Into the Heart of Mindfulness coming out next month.
“I suppose what meditation is really about is how we can work with our minds and bodies in a skilful way,” Ed tells me. “You get to see the habitual thoughts that come up, the patterns of how you react to situations. We often react in ways that aren’t very helpful for us, and a lot of our thoughts can be inaccurate or biased, or very self-critical. Meditation is a practice of looking at the mind and body and learning how to manage it.”
Okay, that all sounds particularly excellent. I’ve been a freelance writer for the last 15 years (a preposterous way to earn a living) and as such my brain whirrs and judders and barks and ponders, always unable to switch itself off. If I’m not mentally rewriting pieces from ages ago, I’m trying to come up with ideas, ideas, and then more ideas. I can be jaded and needy, riddled with self-doubt.
There’s also a frightened little mouse that lives in the backwaters of my brain who tots up how much money I’m losing whenever I go on holiday and tells me all about it. You could say I’m aware that my mind and body need some management.
How was it?
In short, I loved it. The plan was to go to a big introductory class at the beginning of the week, then meditate at least once, ideally twice, a day for the following six days (which I did). If it went well, I’d incorporate it into my life forever; if not, we’d never speak of it again.
“You’ll gain a more profound connection and a deeper understanding of life,” my friend Neil told me, before I embarked on my “journey”.
Profound connections. Deeper understandings. These were buzzwords I could really get into bed with. I cycled to my first meditation class wearing stripy shorts and a Bob Dylan T-shirt, so, you know, I was already giving off some pretty trippy vibes.
My gurus at Yoga Point in Brixton were a softly spoken European lady (Dutch, I think), and a guy with a goatee beard who looked like he’d just taken his shoes off one day and wandered out of the office. He spent the entire first hour sitting perfectly still with a dreamy smile on his face, keeping completely schtum. The order of the evening was to learn about the Mindfulness of Breathing by doing a couple of 20-30 minute meditations.
Being new to it all, I tried to ape my teachers with my own version of astral serenity, adopting a peaceful dreamy grin, only my veneer of stillness acted in stark contrast to the inside of my head, which was like a train station in pandemonium – there was shouting, a constant hum of activity, occasional outbreaks of unnecessary guffawing, indecipherable clanging noises. At one point while everyone else was dutifully counting their breaths, I was imagining what it would be like to be tearing across a motorway on a galloping horse.
Yet somehow, in amongst the chaos and the bedlam, I did connect with occasional moments of quiet and calm – just fractional ones, but enough so that I could hear the lady opposite me snoring her way to her own inner utopia. I wasn’t looking for planet shifting results on my first go, I just wanted a glimmer, and a glimmer is what I got.
The male guru explained that it’s not about emptying your mind, it’s just about learning to focus it, and there was something about that first session that made it seem achievable – it would just take time and practice, so I invested in an iPhone app called Headspace and promised to follow through with my inner journey.
He also said it was like tickling a bubble with a feather, but I wasn’t concentrating at that point, I was back on the M25 trying to calm my trusted steed.
Will I be incorporating meditation into my post-40 lifestyle?
YES, I will. Over the course of the week I changed up the times when I’d meditate. I tried first thing in the morning and last thing at night, I gave it a go at lunchtime on the recommendation of Ed Halliwell.
I sat on the floor, on a chair, I gracefully draped myself over a beanbag, listening to guided meditations on the Headspace app, which would instruct me to focus on each part of my body, before focusing on my breathing, following each breath, in and out, counting as I went.
It was all quite a strange experience. I’d never seen myself as a “meditation guy”– I don’t always recycle, I don’t wander around festivals with my top off – but it was starting to have quite a profound effect on me. In just a week, it felt like the train station in my head had morphed from Paddington on a Friday evening to something closer to Leamington Spa on a Tuesday mid-morning.
My friend Georgia chipped in with some great advice: “Do it every day. Even if it’s for five minutes. The commitment keeps you on track, and if you miss one day, it’s easy to miss another and another, then decide you’ll start again next week. Even if it’s the last five minutes before you fall asleep in bed, do it every day.”
That’s the plan.
From: The Telegraph