Let's start meditating together!

There are 2 very valuable activities involved with becoming a meditator: learning about meditation and then actually doing it. The mindfulness summit has been really terrific in the "learning" department, and has been very inspiring as well. I'm so very glad that I signed up for it.

However, I'm also very interested in moving on to practice. While this summit has given us some very basic options for that, I'm very interested in finding something that provides more structure and guidance. I purchased meditation books before, but it is never "stuck," and I want something structured that will help me build lifelong habit even though my schedule is already very busy. I want something that an expert is designed from the ground up, that many other people have used successfully.

I think that I may have found what I'm looking for in a program that was recommended to me by Georgie Oldfield, the founder of SIRPA. One of her TMS clients recommended it to her, and she has begun recommending it to her other clients as well. They say that it helps them a lot.

It is called HeadSpace, and it was created by a gentleman from the UK named Andy Puddicombe, who also spent about 10 years as a Buddhist monk in Tibet and Myanmar. It keeps everything simple, and is focused on helping people integrate meditation into their own lives. It's very down to earth, and it keeps things clear and simple.

The program is so successful, that it is given out by some corporations, like Google and Goldman Sachs, to all of their employees for free. While the program does cost the rest of us some money, at less than $15 for a month, it's a tiny expenditure compared with the cost of doing a mindfulness course in person or even the cost of doing a single session of psychotherapy. Of course, from from my perspective, learning to meditate is like getting proper healthcare, I want the best services that I can afford. This is my life or talking about!

I mentioned that headspace is used at Google. Here is a talk given at Google by Andy:

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I just signed up for Headspace and then planning to do it with my best friend. Learning to meditate and starting a daily practice that lasts for the rest of one's life is not an easy feat, and you're much more likely to be successful in it, if you do it with friends. If anyone here would like to join us, I'd love to make it a group activity like the Mindfulness Summit has become a group activity. It will help me to have other friends doing it with me.

The 1st day was very simple and easy. It only took 10 minutes, and I feel great because I'm on my way to being a meditator. I can see why literally millions of people have signed up. It probably doesn't hurt that the 1st 10 days of free.

If you'd like to learn more, here is an article from Wired magazine about the new version of Headspace. It begins as follows:

If you haven't already joined the meditation and mindfulness revolution, now is a great moment to jump on the bandwagon. The second version of digital wellbeing platform Headspace, which counts celebrities, members of the Wired team and more than a million other people around the world as fans, was announced today at The Royal Society of Medicine in London.
Read more: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-05/31/headspace-version-2​

Anyone interested or curious about joining us?

 

Hi everyone,

It's terrific to see such a great response to this!! Research has shown that a regular meditation practice can improve our lives in many ways, so it's great to see us working together to support each other in developing a regular practice.

I don't know if people watched the video above, but even the first 10 minutes is terrific. In it, the Google rep, who seems very knowledgeable, said, "[we have research to show that meditation helps], and we know it's really hard to practice. To me the dirty little secret of mindfulness and meditation is that it works and that most people don't do it." I think that this points to a possible goal - the goal is to start a regular habit, to put it into practice.

Research has shown that doing something in a group can tremendously increase our odds of being successful. Not only can we share ideas, but things also just seem much more real when you do them with people. It makes it harder to simply "blow off" and break the habit if you are feeling tired some day.

Responding to Ellen, The modus operandi of this community is that as a science-based peer-oriented nonprofit, we give people science-based information as best we can and then let them make their own decisions. I'd be happy to link up with anyone in the program (I've already started, so feel free to link up with me – you can put in my email address: it's forest at tmswiki dot org). However, others may prefer to do things on their own. We aren't a medical clinic and are just peers, so we trust everyone to know what is best for themselves. However, even if people don't want to link up in the program, having trusted friends in this discussion thread to vent with/ask questions of/discuss how it relates to other aspects of TMS/share ideas and triumphs with seems like something that could help us create new habits.

Speaking of habits, recently I've been listening to The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. It's a nice fun read, full of stories, and it shows how our brains are wired to follow habits. By learning about how habits work, we can make or break them in ways that will have a big impact on our life. It would be a tremendous gift to give yourself the habit of a simple 10 minute per day meditation practice. Once the habit is in place, you can learn more through classes or additional books, either in Buddhist, research, self-help, psychotherapeutic or other traditions, but the first thing is just to get started and keep going.

In this spirit, I see a lot of interesting and smart ideas in this thread, but I wonder if we might be best served by limiting our focus. In other words, if the goal is to just get started, it might actually be better to not have too many options and instead to focus in on a few options that are most likely to lead to success in starting a new habit. I think we want to keep it as simple as possible and just get started doing it regularly so we maximize our chances of getting the habit to stick.

In fact, we might want to limit to just one option. Bearing in mind the above, it may help if we try to at least get a core group of people who are pursuing roughly the same program. Others may participate in different ways, but I think it would be very helpful to have that core group urging each other along. To some degree we have already achieved this because I've already committed with my friend to do the HeadSpace program. We just re-did the first session earlier tonight and it was relaxing and easy.

If anyone else wants to give it a try, the first ten days don't even require a credit card:
https://www.headspace.com/
You can just give it a try to see what you think. If you like it, feel free to add me by putting in my email address as I described above.

 

My new habit is listening to the Summit every day! And I'm pleased to say that mostly I'm achieving that goal - every morning I wake up and reach for my tablet, looking forward to the next presentation. I've only missed one so far due to an early meeting, and will catch up to it eventually because I bought the all-access pass and I've been downloading as I go.

No new apps for me until the Summit is over

 

You know, I've been thinking about bumping this thread for a while. I find it really hard to make time for meditation and was hoping that by making it as simple as possible and introducing a community aspect that perhaps I could start a regular habit. If others want to give it a try, I'd still be up for it.

I've always struggled with a short attention span, so when I've tried to meditate before, it has almost been physically painful. But when study after study shows the benefits of meditating, it's still attractive. And my short attention span may just mean that I have more to gain by cultivating my ability to focus. I like the idea of headspace because the meditations are only 10 minutes and there is always a recording to listen to, which I find makes it easier.

It does remind me a bit of what I wrote in the following post about "magazine reading:"
http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/tms-forum-obsession.11614/#post-61481
It's great to read about meditation, but to get the benefits, we have to actually start a daily habit. I know that some other members on the forum have been successful with this but so far I haven't.

 

Speaking of which, here's a quote from another post from today:

Source: http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/positive-changes-with-sep.11647/

Go Toby!