Mindfulness: Andy Puddicombe

Don’t Tell Me The Score

Mindfulness is a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations. It can help relieve stress, improve physical and mental wellbeing, lower blood pressure, reduce chronic pain and improve sleep. Mindfulness can also improve your sporting and work performance and contribute to more fulfilling relationships. This week on DTMTS, Simon Mundie is sitting down with the man who has done as much as anyone to popularise mindfulness in the UK, Headspace co-founder Andy Puddicombe. Andy spent ten years as a Buddhist monk before returning to Britain to share what he had learned. In this episode Andy talks about his journey to Tibet and what life was like as a monk. They discuss the nuts and bolts of mindfulness, and dispel some key misconceptions that put people off. Andy is full of tips on how to start a mindfulness practice and keep it going, and how to be more mindful as you go about your day. They discuss how mindfulness directly applies to sport, and how it can be used by sportspeople on the pitch and off it and even go deep into the ultimate aim of meditation: to achieve enlightenment and experience 'non-duality'.