完全放空十分钟是多久以前的事了?

　　不传短信、不说话也不思考?

　　专注专家Andy Puddicombe 描述放空的不可思议的力量：每天花十分钟清空脑袋，单纯的感觉和感受当下。

　　TED演讲英文文稿:

　　TED演讲中文文稿:

　　00:11

　　We live in an incredibly busy world. The pace of life is often frantic, our minds are always busy, andwe're always doing something.

　　00:19

　　So with that in mind, I'd like you just to take a moment to think, when did you last take any timeto do nothing? Just 10 minutes, undisturbed? And when I say nothing, I do mean nothing. Sothat's no emailing, texting, no Internet, no TV, no chatting, no eating, no reading. Not evensitting there reminiscing about the past or planning for the future. Simply doing nothing. I see alot of very blank faces.

　　(无法正常播放视频的童鞋点击这里喔~)

　　00:49

　　(Laughter)

　　00:50

　　You probably have to go a long way back.

　　00:51

　　And this is an extraordinary thing, right? We're talking about our mind. The mind, our mostvaluable and precious resource, through which we experience every single moment of our life. Themind that we rely upon to be happy, content, emotionally stable as individuals, and at the sametime, to be kind and thoughtful and considerate in our relationships with others. This is the samemind that we depend upon to be focused, creative, spontaneous, and to perform at our very bestin everything that we do. And yet, we don't take any time out to look after it. In fact, we spendmore time looking after our cars, our clothes and our hair than we -- okay, maybe not our hair,

　　01:36

　　(Laughter)

　　01:37

　　but you see where I'm going.

　　01:39

　　The result, of course, is that we get stressed. You know, the mind whizzes away like a washingmachine going round and round, lots of difficult, confusing emotions, and we don't really knowhow to deal with that. And the sad fact is that we are so distracted that we're no longer present inthe world in which we live. We miss out on the things that are most important to us, and thecrazy thing is that everybody just assumes, that's the way life is, so we've just kind of got to geton with it. That's really not how it has to be.

　　02:12

　　So I was about 11 when I went along to my first meditation class. And trust me, it had all thestereotypes that you can imagine, the sitting cross-legged on the floor, the incense, the herbaltea, the vegetarians, the whole deal, but my mom was going and I was intrigued, so I went alongwith her. I'd also seen a few kung fu movies, and secretly I kind of thought I might be able tolearn how to fly, but I was very young at the time. Now as I was there, I guess, like a lot ofpeople, I assumed that it was just an aspirin for the mind. You get stressed, you do somemeditation. I hadn't really thought that it could be sort of preventative in nature, until I was about20, when a number of things happened in my life in quite quick succession, really serious thingswhich just flipped my life upside down and all of a sudden I was inundated with thoughts,inundated with difficult emotions that I didn't know how to cope with. Every time I sort of pushedone down, another one would pop back up again. It was a really very stressful time.

　　03:12

　　I guess we all deal with stress in different ways. Some people will bury themselves in work, gratefulfor the distraction. Others will turn to their friends, their family, looking for support. Some peoplehit the bottle, start taking medication. My own way of dealing with it was to become a monk. So Iquit my degree, I headed off to the Himalayas, I became a monk, and I started studyingmeditation.

　　03:39

　　People often ask me what I learned from that time. Well, obviously it changed things. Let's face it,becoming a celibate monk is going to change a number of things. But it was more than that. Ittaught me -- it gave me a greater appreciation, an understanding for the present moment. By thatI mean not being lost in thought, not being distracted, not being overwhelmed by difficultemotions, but instead learning how to be in the here and now, how to be mindful, how to bepresent.

　　04:15

　　I think the present moment is so underrated. It sounds so ordinary, and yet we spend so littletime in the present moment that it's anything but ordinary. There was a research paper that cameout of Harvard, just recently, that said on average, our minds are lost in thought almost 47percent of the time. 47 percent. At the same time, this sort of constant mind-wandering is also adirect cause of unhappiness. Now we're not here for that long anyway, but to spend almost half ofour life lost in thought and potentially quite unhappy, I don't know, it just kind of seems tragic,actually, especially when there's something we can do about it, when there's a positive, practical,achievable, scientifically proven technique which allows our mind to be more healthy, to be moremindful and less distracted.

　　05:13

　　And the beauty of it is that even though it need only take about 10 minutes a day, it impacts ourentire life. But we need to know how to do it. We need an exercise. We need a framework to learnhow to be more mindful. That's essentially what meditation is. It's familiarizing ourselves with thepresent moment. But we also need to know how to approach it in the right way to get the bestfrom it. And that's what these are for, in case you've been wondering, because most peopleassume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehowcontrolling the mind, but actually it's quite different from that. It's more about stepping back, sortof seeing the thought clearly, witnessing it coming and going, emotions coming and goingwithout judgment, but with a relaxed, focused mind.

　　06:04

　　So for example, right now, if I focus too much on the balls, then there's no way I can relax andtalk to you at the same time. Equally, if I relax too much talking to you, there's no way I can focuson the balls. I'm going to drop them. Now in life, and in meditation, there'll be times when thefocus becomes a little bit too intense, and life starts to feel a bit like this. It's a very uncomfortableway to live life, when you get this tight and stressed. At other times, we might take our foot offthe gas a little bit too much, and things just become a sort of little bit like this. Of course inmeditation --

　　06:39

　　(Snores)

　　06:40

　　we're going to end up falling asleep. So we're looking for a balance, a focused relaxation where wecan allow thoughts to come and go without all the usual involvement.

　　06:50

　　Now, what usually happens when we're learning to be mindful is that we get distracted by athought. Let's say this is an anxious thought. Everything's going fine, and we see the anxiousthought. "Oh, I didn't realize I was worried about that." You go back to it, repeat it. "Oh, I amworried. I really am worried. Wow, there's so much anxiety." And before we know it, right, we'reanxious about feeling anxious.

　　07:14

　　(Laughter)

　　07:15

　　You know, this is crazy. We do this all the time, even on an everyday level. If you think about thelast time you had a wobbly tooth. You know it's wobbly, and you know that it hurts. But what doyou do every 20, 30 seconds?

　　07:31

　　(Mumbling)

　　07:33

　　It does hurt. And we reinforce the storyline, right? And we just keep telling ourselves, and we do itall the time. And it's only in learning to watch the mind in this way that we can start to let go ofthose storylines and patterns of mind. But when you sit down and you watch the mind in thisway, you might see many different patterns. You might find a mind that's really restless and -- thewhole time. Don't be surprised if you feel a bit agitated in your body when you sit down to donothing and your mind feels like that. You might find a mind that's very dull and boring, and it'sjust, almost mechanical, it just seems it's as if you're getting up, going to work, eat, sleep, get up,work. Or it might just be that one little nagging thought that just goes round and round yourmind.

　　08:21

　　Well, whatever it is, meditation offers the opportunity, the potential to step back and to get adifferent perspective, to see that things aren't always as they appear. We can't change every littlething that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it. That's thepotential of meditation, of mindfulness. You don't have to burn any incense, and you definitelydon't have to sit on the floor. All you need to do is to take 10 minutes out a day to step back, tofamiliarize yourself with the present moment so that you get to experience a greater sense offocus, calm and clarity in your life.

　　09:08

　　Thank you very much.

　　09:09

　　(Applause)

（编辑：何莹莹）