Its time for presence giving!

‘Everyone is talking about presence these days and it's not even nearly Christmas! As mindfulness meditation becomes increasingly popular, people are starting to be introduced to the idea of presence. Mindfulness is about practising presence. I was talking to my girlfriend’s mother about this idea and she had the good sense to ask, “ but what does it actually mean to be present?” I was stumped as I tried to describe it. I kept fumbling around for the right words. Granted, she is Spanish with English her second language, but even without this barrier, I would have failed to clearly explain it. I know what it feels like it to be present as I have practised it in meditation. But unless you have experienced it yourself, it would be like describing the colour green to a blind person.

The 9th sense

To describe presence I said, “close your eyes and notice your feet on the ground”. This ability to notice the feet is actually one of your senses and its called proprioception. You can blame Aristotle for making you think that you only had 5 senses. Really you have somewhere between 9 and 33 senses and none of them allows you to see dead people.

Just FYI these extra senses included the sense of balance, the sense of stretch (including stomach, bladder, skin and muscle stretch) and plenty more.

 

What presence isn’t

My request to have her feel her feet was not even a good explanation of presence, it was just her using one of the lesser-known senses. You can be present when noticing a sound or a smell but if you are only focusing on that one thing then you have become fixated on it, and are no longer aware of all that is happening. It wasn’t until I spent a week in Verona, training to be a Holistic Counsellor, that I discovered what presence really was.
 

The landscape outside the course in Verona

While feeling your feet may not be exactly what ‘presence’ is, using the senses is a common way to come into the body and out of the head. This allows you to quieten your thoughts. The thinking mind is the most common obstacle to the present moment. When we are planning, replaying past events or worrying, we are not in the present moment, we are in the past or future.

If you were to take a look ‘under the hood’ of your brain when you are present you would see that your brain waves move from a fast-paced, high-frequency beta state to a slow speed alpha state. Beta brain waves are good for planning, taking exams, or awkward first dates.  Alpha brain waves are the ones responsible for inner thought, creativity and the much sought after state of ‘inner peace’. Whilst neither state is better or worse, it is a problem in our society that we are spending too much time in an beta state. This is why we are seeing more and more people suffering from anxiety, insomnia and burn out.

Why do others want me to be present?

In the holistic counselling game, presence is seen to be so important to a client that my course dedicates the whole of the first week to the practice of it. Giving someone your full presence, whether as a counsellor or friend, is like the sun finally shining on the leaves of a flower. Only then does the flower start to blossom. We want presence and when we don’t get it, we suffer.  

Have you noticed how difficult it is to talk to someone when you know they are not present? They may be nodding along, “ummm hmmming” away but you know they aren’t really interested in what you have to say. How does this make you feel? I know how much it irritates me.

There is a big difference between listening and waiting for your turn to talk.

 

The Art of Being Present

Module 1 is titled ‘The Art of Being Present’. And this is a good way to think of presence...as an art, not a science. Presence is something definable by the individual. No one is going to decide for you what good presence and bad presence is. It is something you practice and it evolves with time.

Why do I even want to be present?

Because being out of presence is suffering. Eckhart Tolle is probably the most famous proponent of the ‘present moment’ thanks to his book ‘The Power of Now’. The present moment gives you something that I can never get enough of: calm, peace, and an absence of worries about the future or regrets about the past. All of our problems, anxieties, traumas and fears only exist in our minds. Come out of the mind and into the present moment and these pesky things disappear. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all your problems disappear?

Tolle suggests:

 

Come into the present moment.  Just be, and enjoy being. If you are present, there is never any need for you to wait for anything.”

“If you are in the habit of creating suffering for yourself, then you are probably creating suffering for others too.”

Here's Eckhart wondering why you're not listening to him.

Judging, interpreting and being clever.

On my course, I was lucky enough to be working with some highly sensitive and attuned students. These people can smell your fear like dogs. We had to give several counselling sessions to each other where we were observed by members of the group. This was nervewracking, especially as we had all dived very deeply into our emotions during the week and big things were coming up for people. The most common feedback I received from my counselling was that my pretend client could actually sense when I was in my head and not in my body. This made them feel unsafe, untrusting and even aggressive towards me. Imagine that, not being present actually made someone angry at me! When I think about it, it isn't that hard to imagine. I just remember the nodding “umm hmming” person I thought of earlier.

Many times during a counselling session I would go into my head so that I could think of the next clever thing to say, to fix or impress this client. And this is exactly where I became exposed! People don’t want to be fixed, they want your undivided attention shining on them as they fix themselves. This is the simplest and most generous thing you can do for someone. Give someone this gift and watch them expand.

How to be present

The easiest way to remain present for someone is to anchor yourself in your body. Point your attention to somewhere safe, like your feet or your legs. Then hold eye contact. We were advised to keep 60% of our attention within ourselves and 40% with the other. With practice, this state of presence becomes a meditation in itself. You can recharge as you rest in the present moment without having to do things for others. You are freed from the pressure to perform, the pressure to please, the pressure to do. You can simply be. Many people laughed at how simple a concept this was. We could be counsellors, being present for a client, allowing them to heal themselves, recharging, all while getting paid. It sounds like a big scam but is actually the perfect scenario for all parties.

Yes, of course, there’s research on the benefits

It wouldn’t be like me to post an article without some sciency stuff to back up the ‘woo woo’. Mindfulness meditation has received a great deal of research on its benefits. One such study from Brown University showed that people who practised mindfulness meditation demonstrated more pronounced alpha waves and greater attention to sensory details than those who did not practice. And the key part of this is that they experienced these things off of the meditation matt. They were able to carry their alpha waves with them into the real world.

Moving from doing to being

We are in a ‘doing’ society. Everything is about doing. We are bombarded with pressure to do, to create, to achieve.  People (a.k.a.. me) have forgotten the importance of simply being. While it is useful to set goals and be productive, it is not useful to burn yourself out on production. You need a balance of rest and enjoyment if you really want to achieve. I can’t have one without the other. I can’t produce or ‘do’ unless I have allowed myself enough time to rest and ‘be’. And I cannot ‘be’ unless I have satisfied myself that I have done enough doing. No one is trying to tell you to go and spend the rest of your life in a Himalayan monastery meditating 14 hours a day. This is just about finding balance. The present moment is where I expect to find my balance. 
 

A Pizza Meditation

Mmm pizza. Ahhhh, meditation. Is it a coincidence that the meditative sound of AUM is so similar to the pizza eating “nom nom nom”, I ask you? Definitely not! Can adding these two things together make each of them easier to digest? Can it help you with stress and anxiety? Can it even help you to lose weight? The answers are, of course, yes. And they revolve around ‘non-attachment’ and mindful eating.

Attachment is the origin, the root of suffering; hence it is the cause of suffering.

- The Dalai Lama

 

Pizza anxiety

I try to follow the 80/20 principle of eating very well 80% of the time and allowing the reigns to loosen 20% of the time, with a pizza or burger each week. When eating something like pizza, I notice that after getting halfway through, I start to worry. I get anxious that soon the pizza will be gone. There will be no more pizza for another week or so. This is where my mindfulness practice kicks in. I note my attachment to pleasure and then I let go of it. I let go of the fear that in the very near future, my plate will be empty. I then bring myself back to the moment and continue to enjoy said pizza. My anxiety about a potential future is robbing me of my present moment pleasure.

Mindfulness meditation is simply about bringing yourself back to a point of focus. Usually, you would do this with your eyes closed, without distraction and you would be bringing your attention back to the breath each time your mind wanders. But the pizza meditation is mindfulness in real life. Instead of your point of attention being your breath, it is your pizza.

Let it go

I mentioned in my last post that I have come to agree with the idea that happiness is not the fulfilment of desire but the freedom from desires. This is a very wise and ancient Buddhist concept (not a Disney one). It is about letting it go. While I may not be one with the wind and sky yet, I am getting better at understanding non-attachment.

Ritualistic pizza destruction

If you have seen “7 Years in Tibet” or “House of Cards” season 3 episode 7  you will be familiar with the idea of a sand mandala. This is a Tibetan Buddhist practice of creating a beautiful image out of coloured sand and then ritualistically destroying it. The purpose of this is to be reminded of the transient nature of material. Nothing lasts forever, so don’t get too attached to it. My pizza is my sand mandala.

Mindful eating

Mindful eating is actually becoming quite a popular concept. At edgy tech companies in Silicon Valley, they hold mindful eating lunches where staff are taught how to savour their meals. They will try to be present for every aspect of their food. They will look at the colours on their plates. They will smell the food before they place it in their mouths. They will chew their food and notice not just the taste, but also the textures and even the sounds that the chewing makes.

Meditation for fat loss

The benefits of mindful eating are not just mental. Chewing your food for longer helps with digestion. Slowing down the eating process allows time for your stomach to signal to your brain that it is satisfied and to start producing the fullness hormone, leptin. Slowing down eating also means that the post-meal insulin spike will be lower. This helps the body store food inside of muscle cells rather than fat cells. Plus it lessens the post-prandial crash, aka food coma.

This guy knows.

So, not only does your pizza meditation help you to enjoy your food but it will also contribute to better weight management and increased energy. As with so many things about our health, they are holistic. I.e. food contributes to your mood, your weight and your energy.

Are you aware of how much stress may be interfering with your weight?

When you are stressed you are more likely to overeat. When you are stressed your body releases cortisol.

High cortisol levels contribute to fat storage, especially around the waist.

What can you do about this?

How about adding a pinch of gratitude to your meal?

It is physiologically impossible to feel anxious when you are being grateful.  When you are being grateful the threatening messages from the brain’s fear centre, the amygdala, are cut off. Plus the anxious signals from the brain-stem do not function. Be grateful for all the people, plants and animals that have contributed to bringing the food to your plate. From the farmer who grew it, to the pilot who has flown it from Argentina to the chef who washed and prepared it for you.

Do try this at home

Give it a try for your next meal. Chew your food around 30 times per mouthful. Put your knife & fork down between mouthfuls. Listen to the difference in the crunch between a piece of celery and a tomato. Smell the food before you shove it down your gob. Notice the colours. Say thank you and enjoy it without getting attached to it. Each time your attention wanders, gently bring it back to your food.

Floatopia

 

Surely you know what floating is by now? Everyone has been doing it. From John Lennon, who credited it with weaning him off of heroin, to Wayne Rooney using it to recover from injury. Floating is mainstream now so I thought I had better give it a go. And when I give things a go, I dive in head-first, although that would be pretty dangerous in a float tank. So I committed to floating 3 hours per week for 2 months at The Floatworks in Vauxhall to see if it would make me any more enlightened. Which, would be pretty darn enlightened. (I rank enlightenment by how big one’s topknot is).

Famous Floaters

What is floating?

For the uninformed, floating, aka isolation tanks, aka sensory deprivation tanks are a form of therapy where you lie in a pool of water, about 1 foot deep, usually for an hour, without getting out. The water is filled with so much Epsom Salt that you remain buoyant and weightless, like if you were in the Dead Sea. The water is set to your body temperature so you don’t notice hot or cold. The pod is pitch black so there is no light and you wear ear plugs to keep the water and sound out of your ears. Hence, sensory deprivation.

 

Intentions

The first few floats were very challenging as I was still trying to control my thoughts. My intention was to go into the tank with some questions for myself and come out with answers. Big questions, like ‘what is my purpose in life’, ‘how can I be less selfish’, ‘what is god’ and ‘is our civilisation going to collapse’? My mind wasn’t up for that though. He wanted to run its usual cycle of planning, then food, then self-help activities then things to buy and back around again. He just wanted to keep running on that hamster wheel, around and around, while getting nowhere. I had a really uncomfortable premonition that if my thoughts were to stop, the walls of my mind would close in on me like the garbage compactor Luke and Han get trapped in on the Death Star.

 

Back in the womb

What happens to you when everything that occupies your life is taken away? It would probably be the first time since you were in the womb that you had no stimulus to be occupied with. You have nothing to distract you from yourself. This could be a chilling idea to some. When I first encountered it, I was introduced to my holes. These are the holes that A.H. Almas writes about. The empty parts of me, where I have lost contact with my essence. My holes are usually filled with work, with productivity, social media, food and relationships. Once these are stripped away, I am left with the void, an expanse of nothingness. I am confronted with lack. And it is really scary! Almaas suggests that the way to deal with our holes is not to fill them, but to become comfortable with them. To face them, look into them and allow them to be. This is what I try to do in the tank but I ain’t going to fix it all in a 1-hour float.

 

To combat the feeling of holes, my hamster-wheel brain would go into overdrive. Thinking even more furiously to avoid the discomfort of these holes. But eventually, my hamster would run out of steam. Momentarily, I would experience peace. I would experience a quiet mind. It was lovely. It was blissful. Then, the thinking mind would shove his big butt back in and start the wheel back up again. This was frustrating and I would find myself longing for the time to be over so I could get back to cramming my holes full of doing.

 

As I became more accustomed to floating, I developed tools to combat my thinking mind’s misbehaviour. When it invaded my thoughts with a suggestion to get out early, instead of indulging this disobedient child, I would curiously enquire as to why it felt discomfort. Just the simple act of asking the mind what was wrong was enough to placate it and ease its discomfort. This is very similar to what people experience with mindfulness meditation; the discomfort and urge to quit.

 

The amygdala switch

After around three floats, your mind gets used to the unusual environment and it allows your amygdala to switch off. This is the part of the brain that’s responsible for emotions and cortisol release. This post-float shut down has actually been shown to decrease anxiety more effectively than medication. The more you float, the more you benefit.

 

The way I have been writing about my mind may have you thinking that all that time alone has given me some sort of schizophrenic disorder. And if you are thinking that, my mind told me to tell you to shut up!  ‘The Untethered Soul’ by Michael A. Singer explains what I mean beautifully. You will come to see that you are not your thoughts, but really, you are the one who witnesses the thoughts. Have you ever had a really nasty thought that you felt ashamed of? (I hope so, or this analogy is going to make me look really bad.)

For example, you get that momentary urge to push an old lady into a swimming pool or pull someone’s chair out from under them as they are about to sit down. Nasty things. Then you judge yourself as horrible. Now that I have seen this separation between me and my thoughts I am able to just laugh at my mind when it says things like that. I know that it is not really me, and knowing that, I don’t feel the need to judge myself.

 

What are you doing here?

I want to know myself. I want to know what my purpose in life is. I want to get in touch with my higher self, the one who knows what is best for me, and I can only do this when my mind frees itself from distraction. These are the questions I want answers to. As your brain moves from producing high-alertness alpha waves down to theta waves, you are able to be in a more creative and present state. This is actually the boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind. The slowing down of brain waves is one of the scientifically backed benefits of floatation therapy.

 

With these slower brain waves, the realisations I get in the tank are profound. In my life, I chase discomfort, as I know that this is the fire that fuels my development. Recently,  I made a conscious decision to stop wasting money on things that make my life more comfortable and spend it on things that enable me to tolerate more discomfort. I want to be free from my wants. In the tank, I come to realise that happiness is not the satisfaction of my desires, it is freedom from desire. I want to not want. That’s a difficult one to get your head around. But it is something that Buddha realised a long time ago.
 

A safe place

(To steal a line from Jack Dee,) being an adult isn’t as much fun as I thought it would be when I was a kid. Yes, you get to run with scissors but the novelty wears off. Being an adult, especially an adult male, means I think that crying is a sign of weakness. During my months of floating, I had something very difficult and life-changing to deal with that hurt immensely. Giving myself a private little cave to cry in was so relieving. Usually, a feeling would arise and I would distract myself with doing, or TV or IG.

When we don’t feel our feelings they get buried in our subconscious and reappear in the forms of addictions, OCD, anxiety, anger or depression. In the tank, you can’t escape your emotions. You feel them and let them do their much-needed work. After crying my little eyes out I felt so peaceful. It was bliss.

At the start of the floating month, I would be trying to clock watch with no access to an actual clock. By the end, I felt cocooned in the lovely warm water. I wouldn’t want to get out because of the freedom to feel it gave me.

The big one  - 2:30hrs in the tank

I stepped up from 1 hour in the tank to more than double that after a month. 1 hour had become quite easy and you know how I feel about comfort. Before I went into the tank for that 1st double session I noticed that I was trying to delay the start by chatting with the staff or stretching. It made me laugh to see how afraid I was of simply spending time with myself. For those who have actually spent 2:30hours in my company, I’m not that bad, am I?!

 

As you will see from the image of my heart rate, in the 2nd hour my heart rate became even lower with much fewer spikes and much more consistency.

The Transformation Rating chart below shows that Floating gets a great score. It really does get easier after 3 sessions and has become a valuable tool in my battle against modern city living. In my month I have discovered what I want in life (not to want!), I have been able to feel my emotions in a healthier way and I have started to befriend my ‘holes’. I think the most valuable thing I gained is the ability to search for answers inside of myself and feel guidance from a part of me that I could not access before. 

 

If you want to give it a try you can use the promo code FLOATBLAKE which gets you 15% off the Single Float and 5 Float Experience. 

https://floatworks.com/

---

You can’t spell self-improvement without IMPROV

Scared, judgemental, everyone is weird but me. These are my thoughts as I am looking out at a group of nice, young people I have just met. We are standing in a circle about to play improv games and I am thinking about how I could escape. I would add that this is my reaction to every meeting with a new group of humans. When I meet new people I judge. I find reasons why I wouldn’t want to be friends with them so that if they don’t want to be my friend, it doesn’t matter as I have already found reasons to reject them. This sounds like the reaction of a 5-year-old child. And it probably is a reaction I learned aged 5. It's just a pattern that I have not let go of yet. Thankfully, I can notice this now. It goes away with a kind and gentle ‘thanks for looking out for us 5-year-old Richard but don’t worry, adult Richard is here and we know how to socialise a bit better now.’ Given that improv is very much about getting in touch with our playful, imaginative, creative and judgement-free inner-child I knew I didn’t want to scare little Richard away.

Let fear be your guide

So the story is that I signed up for an 8-week improvised comedy class that ended with a live performance in front of an actual audience of people. Each week we met for 2 and a half hours to play games and create improv scenes. If you don’t know what improv is, think “Whose Line Is It Anyway”.

I’m doing this because it scares the hell out of me. The thought of being on stage without any lines to rely on, while being stared at by strangers who expect you to make them laugh is the stuff of nightmares for many. But I am trying to let fear be my guide in life now. If there is something that really scares me, I know that it’s a sign-post towards growth. I have to confront it, or it will hold me back. Thankfully, I am very funny so improv is going to be a cinch for me (lied Richard).

Let’s play make-believe!

Once I get past the hurdle of meeting new people, I am confronted with the next obstacle. I have to create scenes that make sense and are enjoyable to watch. While there is no overt pressure in improv to be funny or great, internally this is what I want to be. In an improv course, you spend a lot of time just playing games with the purpose of getting you out of your head and into the moment. This isn’t acting, it's just fun. The kind of fun you have when you are a child and you play cowboys and Indians or doctors and nurses.

Freedom from self

I have spent a lifetime creating an identity for myself. I am a coach and nutritionist and I wear these clothes and have these opinions. I think I know who I am. But then for one evening a week I am an astronaut, then a superhero, then a witch, then an estranged step-daughter amongst other things. As we grow up, we are put into boxes so that we can fit neatly into our families, our social groups and our society. As I watch others in the group performing I notice that the people who struggle are the ones who are most attached to their boxes (aka their ego structures). They are too tied to their own identity to play the milkman or the astronaut and it is awkward to watch.

When you are doing improv you realise how constricted you are and how easy it is to be someone else. We are all playing characters in our lives, we are wearing masks of personalities, and doing improv showed me how easy it is to make a change. Maybe you are playing a character you don’t like but feel too tied to it to drop. This is an important reminder to me, to see how I can coach people into being someone they are actually choosing to be instead of someone they were told to be.

Mindfulness meditation helps precisely with this. You practice noticing when you are playing your character. When you are on autopilot, reacting to the emotions your character wants you to play. By sitting in meditation for 20 minutes or so, you are stepping out of that character and watching your mind run. The goal of meditation is to be able to take that practice into the real world so you can be aware of when your reactivity takes control.

How do I make people like me?

Many self development and dating courses actually take people to an improv class. Taking a course like this teaches you how to interact creatively, have ‘banter’ and fun conversations. You get this by being at ease with yourself. Have you noticed that the people who are easiest to talk to are simply very comfortable with themselves? They don’t need anything from you, like approval or validation. They already have these things so the pressure for you to give it to them is relieved and you can just have a pleasant conversation. This is how improv helped me. By making me more present in the conversation and less needy for approval.

Listening: you really have to listen to be funny. If you don’t listen during a scene, you will take the plot way off course and the audience won’t follow. The funniest jokes are ones that are relevant to what the other person has said. And if you want other people to like you, you need to listen to them.

As Dale Carnegie says in How to Win Friends and Influence People, “be more interested, than interesting.”

Performing on stage

The final performance took place above a pub in South Bank in front of about 100 people. This was the hardest part. Halfway through my first class I was thinking, there is absolutely no way I am getting up on stage and embarrassing myself. The days leading up to the performance were filled with nerves and stomach butterflies. The live performance is not actually compulsory so I had many intrusive thoughts about how I was going to duck out of it. But again, I used my superhero powers of mindfulness, noticed my discomfort and just allowed it. I allowed myself to feel the fear. You are supposed to feel fear at these times and I told myself that this was okay. Inevitably the fear went away. You can’t be chased by something you turn around and face.

Thankfully, my performance was exhilaratingly fun and not that scary thanks to the support of my classmates. One line went down particularly well and to have 100 people roar at you with their laughter is something I will never forget. The deep sound vibrations of approval hit me and almost knocked me backwards. It was a high like nothing else I have experienced and it came from putting myself in a terrifyingly uncomfortable experience. You don’t get experiences like that from Netflix & chill.

---

Headspace vs Calm - The battle for your inner peace

You’ve seen them before, they’re everywhere….‘Top 5 best meditation apps’ and other 'best lists'. They are great but they don’t really tell you much about the products. So here we have the two heavyweights of the meditation app world. The two apps that are always at the top of the lists. And are the best ranked in the iTunes chart. The two apps that have had the most investment in them and require the most investment from you. If you want to take meditation seriously, you are going to chose one of these two apps.

What are they?

Both apps are a way for you to learn how to meditate. They have intro packs for you to follow and make progress with. They are great for beginners and intermediates, as they give a lot of instruction and tips on how to make meditation easier and more effective. Of course, meditation is no good for meditations’ sake. You want to notice the benefits off of the meditation matt. Fortunately, they both have useful tools to allow you to do this. Hopefully, you are already sold on the idea of meditation, so I won’t go into much detail of why meditation is good for you. I will just compare the apps.

Headsapce intro page

Calm welcome page

Gamification of meditation

We love to compete, we love rewards and whether we know it or not, we love gamification. What this means, is that we love to play life like a computer game. Gamification is a way to increase engagement, participation and loyalty through using computer game mechanics. CrossFit has turned the gym into ‘The Sport of Fitness’, NikeRun have done it with running, Giff Gaff have even done it with a mobile phone network.

With meditation you get ‘run streaks’, badges for completion, and rewards from other meditators. Seeing my journey and all my stats is a visual reward that makes me feel like all the time spent meditating is being counted and therefore not lost in the sands of time.

Headspace does gamification better than Calm. With Headspace I can see all the packs I have done and feel a sense of accomplishment. While Calm has a useful way of tracking; it doesn’t make me feel as much of a mediation bawse as Headspace.

My personal Headspace state

My Calm stats

Usability

Both apps are incredibly simple. There are very clear guidelines for beginners. There are plenty of packs to explore for experienced meditators. In terms of getting the most out of the app, Headspace wins out. There is a clear path, there are useful guidelines and I know what I have to do to become a better meditator. Calm has so many features and extras that I am sometimes left with FOMO. Perhaps if I had spent as much time with Calm as Headspace I wouldn’t have this problem. If you are someone who will use all the extra music and stories then you may prefer Calm but if you just want to get stuck into meditation and feel supported, then Headspace is the one for you

Comparing the visuals of the apps, Headspace’s bright orange, zesty interface invigorates me and keeps me coming back. Calm is too generic looking. Its nature pictures are cliched. Headspace uses cartoons and makes the esoteric world of meditation more friendly and relatable. Given that so many people come into meditation with a sceptical view of the hippy-dippy stuff, I think Headspace works better.

The Voices of Meditation

Now you may not realise this now, but you are going to develop a pretty deep relationship with one of the narrators of these apps. If, like me, you get to spend 180 hours meditating you are going to get pretty intimate with Andy or Tamara. They are going to be with you in some of your most blissful and emotional moments; so it's pretty important that you like who you are going to spend all this time with.

Andy of Headspace

Andy is the co-founder of Headspace and has a very relaxing, English, zen-like voice, born out of his time as a Buddhist Monk. While Tamara is the head of meditation content at Calm. She delivers your sessions with a lovingly enthusiastic American accent. In the past, Headspace’s instructional videos were of Andy speaking to the camera but they have recently been overhauled with some nice cartoons. While this served to heighten the connection with Andy, the cartoons are easier to gain an understanding of the concepts of meditation.

Tamara of Calm

This is just a personal preference but I prefer Tamara of Calm’s loving kindness when I am trying to relax. I often found myself longing for the sessions to last a bit longer to soak in more of her nurturing tones.

Guidance

Calm has some nice stories that help you understand the hows and whys of meditation. The intro packs are at the beginner level, but it is always good to be reminded of important messages. Calm came with a very simple message, that it’s okay just to sit and do nothing. We have become addicted to progress and productivity. We have forgotten this with all the self-help hashtags and motivational IG photos telling us to #nevergiveup.
 

There is a great Buddhist saying that you will see this wise old lion telling you. I like to think it’s Aslan and he was actually a Buddhist lion.

This image goes out to all the people who believe they are too busy to meditate. AKA the people who need meditation the most.

The guidance from Headspace is very well structured.

With Headspace, you will do the same meditation technique over a 10 or 30-day pack. This is great for learning these practices, however, I worry that our society’s attention span is so short, people will not stick to it.Headspace is giving people what they need rather than what they want. Calm tends to mix things up more and will be easier for the noob to stick to.

Calm has some lovely nature sounds as well as healing gongs. These things can help to relax you. However, if you are thinking that you want the long-term benefits of meditation, then being able to relax yourself in any situation then the silence that Headspace offers is more useful. Headspace trains you for the outside world whereas Calm gives you the shorter term relaxation that we sometimes need.

As a purist, I would prefer to see people going with Headspace here.
 

Extras

Calm certainly wins out here. They have loads of bonus features like Sleep Stories, Music for focus, relaxation and sleep plus the options to meditate with just nature sounds for a set time period. They also have lectures by experts in the areas of emotions and meditations etc.

Headspace has a lot more singles focused on things like fear of flying, sports, productivity, anger etc but they are all relatively similar techniques of meditation with different pieces of advice.

 

What matters most

Headspace has a clear path of progress in meditation. You know where you are going on your 30 day journey and this gamification makes me want to keep coming back and maintain my streak of consistency. Calm has so much variety that you can get a bit lost with what to choose. We make so many choices in our daily lives that it's nice to have meditation decided for me. If you are someone who gets overwhelmed with choice and eventually gives up then Headspace is going to be the one for you. Given that consistency is the most important aspect of meditation, then Headspace’s platform is a big winner here.

STATS

Calm 1 year =£93.99 or £9.99 for 1 month

Headspace is £9.99 for 1 month £83.88 for 1 year

Reviews

Calm - 4.7/5 stars on iTunes from 13.6k reviews

Headspace 4.8/5 from 58.5k reviews

7 things I learned from 30 days of yoga

I want to be a real boy. That’s what I think to myself at a meditation retreat beginning 3 months of travelling. I'm the youngest person there and the only one who has to sit on a chair. Everyone else is sat Buddha-like on the floor, while I tower over them and stick out like a sore thumb, with a sore back. Real boys can sit on the floor.  Pinocchio probably could too.

I’ve started referring to my 52kg girlfriend as my mule because she has to carry our shared backpack everywhere as it gives me back pain. I am a hefty 82 kgs…the heaviest I have ever been. I can’t do many of the CrossFit movements I have to teach due to a shoulder injury, I can’t go on hikes while travelling because of plantar fasciitis, I can’t play football because of Achilles tendonitis. And these are just the current issues. I could add more if I did as much sport as I would like to.

I am 30 years old and have more injuries than most 70 year olds. My physiotherapist has become one of my best friends from all my appointments. My girlfriend is a Pilates teacher and my house is filled with foam rollers, lacrosse balls, mobility stars, peptides,  infrared lamps and other modern technologies for healing. Yet, the one thing I have refused to do may be the oldest. Yoga.

I coach people on transforming themselves and I am going to rate yoga’s potential to transform you:

Lesson Number 1 - Routines make things easier

For the next few months I will have limited access to a gym. Now is the time to get healthy. And for me, health simply means ‘pain free’. So off I go on a journey within a journey, of 30 days of yoga…mostly in hostel bedrooms. I won’t be able to get to a class most of the time so I am just going to do 30 days of ‘Yoga with Adriene’ on Youtube. These free videos consist of 15-30 minute beginners routines. I read good reviews of her videos and didn’t want to pay for a subscription to a platform I could very well have given up on after a few days. I have dabbled with a handful of yoga classes before but never enjoyed them and never went consistently.

So here is Lesson Number 1 – It is much easier to do something every day than randomly throughout the week. When you put something in your routine every day it becomes…routine. And guess what, it worked. Spoiler alert…I did 30 days of yoga in a row.

Lesson Number 2 – Nothing worth having comes easily.

Yoga is really hard for me. Like, way, totally harder than any CrossFit WOD. Not because of a physical weakness but a mental one. In yoga, you have time to think about how hard it is and how much easier it would be to give up.

Lesson Number 2  - Yoga is a great reminder to me, a child of Arcade Fire’s ‘Everything Now’ generation, that nothing worth having comes easily. The harder something is, the more rewarding it becomes. In this case I have the physical benefits of being stretchier from yoga plus the mental reward of knowing that I stuck to something that was extremely hard.

Lesson Number 3 – Do what you need to do, not what you want to do.

The first few days of the practice go well but on day ten I get the chance to go to a group class in Saigon. This is when I discover what yoga is supposed to look like…tiny Vietnamese ladies doing the most advanced contortionism I have ever seen, while I slosh sweat all over my mat and stumble on the simplest of balances. This is the reminder of why I hate yoga… because I am sh*t at it. Nobody likes doing things they are bad at, do they?

The lesson… Train your weaknesses, not your strengths. Exercisers seem to fit into one of these three categories:

1. People who are already big and strong lifting weights.

2. Skinny people with good stamina repeatedly doing long distance cardio.

3. Flexible people becoming more flexible by doing yoga.

Nobody is really doing themselves any favours, they are simply massaging their egos.

Lesson Number 4 – Get out of your head and into the present

I am a victim of the Calvinist idea of time being limited and running out. (You probably are too btw). I am constantly looking at my watch. I love productivity and ‘getting stuff done’. I’m using a Pomodoro timer right now to measure my work in blocks of 25 minutes.

Towards the end of my thirty days I went to a yoga and Reiki retreat in Cambodia. Every morning we would have a ninety-minute yoga class. (Three times the length of my longest YouTube video!) The first few days were torturous. Although the moves were fine, I got bored a lot and my eyes wandered to the clock. The only thing that could make time go faster was not thinking about time. Every occasion that I thought about the time would be a reminder that I was not being present and an opportunity to come back to the breath and the present. This is essentially what mindfulness meditation is.

Lesson Number 4 - When you’re trying to escape a situation, stop thinking about it, get out of your head and into the present moment. Lesson Number 4 is basically 236 pages of Eckhart Tolle’s ‘The Power of Now’ condensed into one sentence. Cash Back!

Lesson Number 5 – Don’t compare your Chapter 1 to someone’s Chapter 18

I have a man-bun and am guilty of the worst kind of crime, looking like a yogi but not actually doing yoga. So, when the teacher sees how bad I am at yoga I feel bad about myself. When I look around and see proper yogis doing proper yoga I feel bad about myself. I sweat a lot and sometimes when I roll up from lying on my back the suction from the mat makes a fart noise, so I feel bad about myself.

Lesson Number 5* - Don’t compare your Chapter 1 to someone else’s Chapter 18. I am new to yoga and other people in the class could have been doing it for 20 years. Even better….. Don’t compare yourself to others at all. There will always be opportunities for you to beat yourself up if that’s what you’re in to. Or you can just be present on a yoga mat, doing what you’re doing, not thinking about anything else. Self-flagellation is an easy escape from accepting who you are and avoiding any criticism from anyone else.

Lesson Number 6 – Sticking to things is good

Flash forward to Day 30 and… Yoga works. Huzzah! My plantar fasciitis and achilles tendonitis are gone! I can touch my toes. I can sit cross legged as long as my back is supported. I can carry a backpack. I will continue to do yoga for the next 3 months and go down to 72 kgs.

Lesson number 6* Sticking to things is good. Obvious, I know. But simply sticking to something, anything, gives you a sense of achievement. Giving up gives you short term relief but in the long run you may face guilt. I felt a great deal of satisfaction just because I did something I set out to do.  When people would suggest yoga to me in the past I would fend them off as I had done the odd class here and there. But for me to really understand the benefits of it, I had to do it for 30 days consistently, and unsurprisingly, I got a huge amount out of it.

Consistency matters. The same principle applies to going to the gym, dieting, spiritual/therapeutic practices. If you do one 10k run, if you eat one Buddha bowl, if you go to one therapy session or do 10 minutes of meditation, you will not notice the benefits. Or even if you do a week of eating clean, a month of meditation, a year of Zumba, as soon as you stop, the tangible benefits fade. Stick with it. Make it a habit.

Lesson Number 7 – “80% of anything in life is just showing up.”

Resilience is the most important of traits to cultivate. This is Tony Robbins’ favourite attribute. If you have resilience you can do anything. While travelling I faced many minor obstacles to getting the yoga done and ‘showing up’. I didn’t have a mat, we were staying in hostels without enough floor space, it was so humid that my sweat would drench the mat making it impossible to hold a position, I didn't have yoga blocks, blah blah blah…. But somehow, I cultivated enough resilience to do this and the more I thought about this, the more resilience I found.

As Woody Allen once said, “80% of anything in life is just showing up”. I had crap days as well as good days of yoga. When I just got on the matt, and didn’t worry about how well I was going to do yoga, things were fine. Things got easier. I just got out of my head and got on with it. Sometimes its okay just to go easy on yourself.

So here is the final score for yoga and how much I think it can help people transform their lives.

What happens when you pay someone to let you work for them?

Work As Meditation

Hi, my name is Richard and I’m the idiot who went to an Indian ashram and paid them to let me work there. This wasn’t an internship with a step on the ladder at the end. This was ‘Work as Meditation’. This was me doing crappy jobs like greeting new guests, copying and pasting long talks into order, building IKEA furniture, bag checking for security and taking payments for new arrivals. You work every day for at least 8 hours and there are no days off.

Why would anyone do this, I hear you say?

The answer could be any of:

1. I’m an idiot

2. They brain-washed me

3. I wanted to learn how to enjoy any job and teach this to people in the West.

Now, I say I’m the idiot, but there were many other idiots there and there have been idiots for hundreds of years who have gone to ashrams and worked for rewards other than money. The idea is that anyone can be meditative sat in a silent room while following their breath… but wouldn’t it be nice if we could have that same sense of calm and presence in stressful situations like work?

We spend most of our lives trading our time for money, and spend much of that time dreaming of how we are going to spend that money. All these dreams take place in the future so we sacrifice the only thing we really have; the present.

I’m just going to share what I learnt about work and maybe you can apply this to yourself. I’m not going to try to convince you of why you need to do a program like this. (I’ve done it, so that you don’t have to).

 

Motivation

Many people’s motivation for work is money.

Without money in the equation my reward became praise. I worked hard so that someone could tell me I was a good boy and that I’m special.

Perhaps, your relationship with earning is the same as this.

In 2008 researchers found that people’s levels of happiness increased as their salaries increased but only up to a point. That point was £62,500 (adjusted for inflation). So, if you are earning more than this, money can take on a different meaning too. Your salary becomes a points system. The more points you have the better you are doing at the game of work and the more people can tell you that you’re a good boy (or girl).

Time

What’s your relationship like with time?

How do you think about time?

Time is money, right?

Time is finite, so make the most of it?

Well it didn’t always work this way. If you’ve read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari you’ll know that the way we think about time comes from the Calvinists. There was a time when we thought about time as circular, where we didn’t worry about clocking in, and we didn’t judge others for leaving the office earlier than us. Productivity wasn’t measured with a clock; it was measured by what was achieved.

I am a perennial clock watcher. I am indignant when others are late or waste my precious time. Like the rest of London, I’m very very busy, all the fricken time.

What I learnt about time on this program is that when you are present in the moment, time stops being so important.

I am no longer having my short life sucked out of me by the ever-advancing clock. I am free. I am not anxiously planning the future. I just am. And funnily enough, the more engrossed I became in what I was doing in the moment, the faster time went. This was really helpful to me. Whenever I thought about time or started planning for the future, I gently reminded myself to get out of my head and into the moment.

Taking things too seriously

I am going to reiterate this, as it was something I often forgot during work….I was paying to work there! There was no possibility of future promotions. I would leave at the end of the course and probably never see any of those people again.

However, there were times when I became really, frustrated, angry, judgemental and upset in my job.

Although the ashram was run by Westerners, it was still in India and therefore, extremely disorganised and bureaucratic. There was a distinct lack of leadership and no one really knew what they were doing. Without clear guidelines, its easy to start panicking and blaming. We were just like children, ‘playing doctors and nurses.’ Except the game was work. As you probably know, sometimes games get out of hand. Monopoly money still has a lot of value to some people.

Egos were everywhere. I believe the Buddha once said, ‘before enlightenment a$$hole…after enlightenment a$$hole.’ Or maybe it was ‘chop wood, carry water’. Sadly, there was no one at this ashram who could call themselves enlightened. (There were more than enough a$$holes)  But the two points here are, before and after enlightenment your life is still filled with the same things and if you’re an asshole before going to an ashram there is a good chance you will still be one if you don’t manage your ego.

I often found my ego getting involved in this game. Thankfully, the game isn’t to transcend the ego, it is just to notice it. Once I did notice it, I was able to release the pent-up emotions and laugh at how silly it all is.

The harder the better

When I was faced with difficult emotions, or challenges, or tasks that seemed too much for me I would go through a familiar pattern of thoughts.

This is BS >

I’m paying to be here >

Everyone is an idiot but me>

I’m going home and taking my football with me. 

Once I had finished with that melodrama and I gotten myself through the struggle I noticed big pay-offs. I noticed that the harder the struggle was the bigger the reward was. The more frustrated I got over misunderstanding IKEA instructions, arguing a theoretical point, screaming and shouting in a dynamic meditation…(the more tension that was built up)… the greater the pleasure upon release.

This is something that David Deida talks about in The Way of The Superior Man:

People, (esp masculine ones) like tension and release. That is basically what a sport like football is. Loads of tension and resistance as one team tries to penetrate a defence, then a huge release of emotion when it happens. If you’ve ever been to a football stadium and witnessed the tension of the last few minutes, one team searching for an equalizer as time runs out. A goal is scored. People go mad. The release is huge. You can see it and hear it and sense it. And yes, that is also what sex is, a build up of tension and release.

What I learnt from this was a reframing. I could choose to do something easy so that I could achieve it. Or I could chose something harder that I knew I would get a greater feeling of reward from at the end. When I chose the greater reward, I stopped focusing on the discomfort and focused on how good I would feel at the end. This completely changed my mindset for the task, I stopped focusing on the difficulties because I knew they would be worth something at the end.

Seek big struggles, receive big rewards…. is what I would say if I was a native American shaman.

The mind gym

Meditation is basically like going to the gym for the mind.

The Work As Meditation program was not about things going well. It was not about doing a good job. It was about being aware and awake to all thoughts and feelings. There were many times when my reaction to any sort of discomfort was to think about escaping.

That was just my ego trying to assert itself. Every internal complaint was a chance to exercise the awareness muscle. And every time you exercise it, it gets stronger. This is how any type of mindfulness mediation works.

You have something to focus on, like your breath, and every time your mind drifts off you notice it, and bring the attention back to the breath. Each time you do this it is like doing a rep of a bench press. The more reps you do, the stronger your awareness muscle gets. So those who say they can’t meditate as their mind will drift off too many times will actually be getting a much better workout than the Buddhist monk who only has to bring his attention back once.

My take home messages

I have taken a lot from this process. It has shown me things about work that I would not have been able to see on my own. Having the chance to take so much time to make work better for me was revolutionary.

What I value most is the recognition that any job can be pleasant when you immerse yourself into it totally. 

This program is clearly not for everyone due to the cost of travel and time required so it doesn’t get the highest transformation rating. But if you want to change your relationship to work without traveling to foreign lands I can give you some jobs to do at my house if you like. I won’t charge you that much. Or we could just have some coaching sessions around it.

Transformation Rating

Scores out of 10

Ease of use = 3

You have to go to an ashram and pay so not available to everyone

Lasting changes = 8

I learnt so much about my relationship to work that I hope will last forever

Time requirement = 2

You need to spend several weeks or months to be accepted on the program

Impact = 8

It totally changed my understanding of what it means to meditate.

Final score = 5.25

A pretty average score but that’s mostly due to the travel and time required

Why I'm a life coach....

Who are you?

Have you ever really considered who is running your life?

Could your life be controlled by bacteria or even your subconscious mind?

Did you know that there are more cells of bacteria in your body than there are of your own cells? Is the bacteria living inside of you or are you living inside the bacteria’s house? 

Or, were you aware that our conscious minds can process only around 40 bits of information per second and our unconscious handles 40 million?! This means that 95-99% of your life is controlled by your unconscious.

These are the types of things that experts from Buddhist monks to Sigmund Freud have been saying for centuries. Finally, science is catching up to show how our brain waves, our gut bacteria and our unconscious all affect us. If we never take the time to investigate these things we won’t get what we want out of life. 

Wouldn’t it be nice to understand how all of these areas add up to the outcomes we see on a daily basis?

Now that you suitably confused about who you are, I can tell you about who I am and how I could be of use to you. My role could be as the mechanic to the vehicle of your life or as a self-experimenter making the mistakes on himself so you don’t have to, or the guide walking you through the wilderness clearing a path, a couple steps ahead of you.

A Life Mechanic

I was once described as being “polished” by Dr Andrew Hill, a neuroscience professor at UCLA. He meant that I looked shiny on the outside but was still figuring out within.

Having worked with Dr Hill for over a year on my brain wave patterns at The Peak Brain Institute in LA, I delved further into the world of biohacking, nootropics and neurotherapy. I learnt about neurofeedback and how our brain waves affect things like moods, performance and stress.

Everything I have learnt about neuroscience, nutrition, psychology and spirituality have given me a more rounded understanding of people. By bringing these separate aspects of the self together I can see a bigger picture.

Working with me would be like working with a mechanic on a car that keeps veering off to the left. You don’t know why the car keeps steering off that way, you just know that you are trying to drive straight. We will take a look under the bonnet of your life to discover, together, what is preventing you from heading in the direction you want to go.

The main difference being that I don’t do that sharp inhale that a mechanic does when they’re about to rip you off. We work together and I am transparent with fees!

Where The Magic Happens

Somebody once drew me this diagram and it has stuck with me ever since. Before seeing this, I was someone who wanted safety and stability. After I had realized how much sense the diagram made I devoted my life to finding places where the magic happened. Many years of stepping out of my comfort zone have given me the experience needed to guide others to identify their own magic.

If you’re looking for a coach who was born with the perfect life and just naturally had it all together then I wish you the best of luck finding them. I am someone who has had a lot of challenges that I have overcome and continue to work on. I have been able to do this by exploring  ancient wisdom, my own spirituality and the latest scientific information. My journey has taken me around the world, from LA, to India, to Cambodia and beyond to find the best practices to bring back to London and help you here.

As a devoted self-experimenter I will continue to tread carefully through the jungle of discomfort a few steps ahead of you, clearing a safe path for others to follow.