Andy Puddicombe

It was a really very stressful time.

I guess we all deal with stress in different ways.

Some people will bury themselves in work, grateful for the distraction.

Others will turn to their friends, their family, looking for support.

Some people hit the bottle, start taking medication.

My own way of dealing with it was to become a monk.

So I quit my degree.

I headed off to the Himalayas.

I became a monk, and I started studying meditation.

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.

It taught me, it gave me a greater appreciation and understanding for the present moment.

By that I mean not being lost in thought,

not being distracted, not being overwhelmed by difficult emotions, but instead learning how to be in the here and now, how to be mindful, how to be present.

I think the present moment is so underrated.

It sounds so ordinary, and yet we spend so little time in the present moment that it's anything but ordinary.

There was a research paper that came out of Harvard just recently

that said, on average, our minds are lost in thought almost 47% of the time.