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Andy Puddicombe, founder of the Headspace app, wants to come across as an everyday guy and normalize meditation.JIM ROSS

Andy Puddicombe has been in my head. He has been talking gently into my ear. And I was letting him do it – every morning. It was intimate. I knew the cadence of his voice, his accent, the way he paused, how he breathed. I anticipated certain phrases he liked to use. Later in the day, I would think about him. I could hear him in my head. And I would look forward to the next time.

But I had to stop.

I never thought that would happen – he had been helping me. Until I met him, in person.

Immediately, the spell was broken.

Maybe you're one of about a million others with whom Puddicombe has been intimate, too. He's the Headspace guy. Headspace is an award-winning mobile app for meditation, launched in early 2012. Since then, with close to a million users, offices in London and Los Angeles and a staff expected to hit 100 employees by the end of this year, Headspace is fast becoming a leading health platform for mindfulness.

In addition to being the voice of the guided meditations on the app, Puddicombe works as a mindfulness consultant to celebrities and business executives. Richard Branson flew him down to Necker Island in the Caribbean to lead a group of social-change entrepreneurs. And the author and TED Talk speaker, whom The New York Times described as "doing for meditation what Jamie Oliver has done for food," has a story that's very seductive.

Born in Bristol, England, he dropped out of university – where he was studying sports science – after some friends were killed in an accident, to go off to the Himalayas in search of meaning. For 10 years, he studied meditation as a Tibetan monk and was fully ordained in northern India as Karma Norbu Gyaltsen, meaning – in rough translation – Precious Jewel Gone Beyond.

And so I made my little pilgrimage to his offices in London, in a cool warehouse conversion in the north end of the capital. There he was in a small boardroom, seated at a table that had flowers and a bowl of fruit on it. I was behind the curtain, having a visit with the Wizard of Om.

Straight away, I lost any sense of wonder.

Across the table from him sat his publicist who was writing things down. A guru with a spinner?

"First of all, Rich [Pierson, his partner in Headspace] and I are very ordinary, regular people," Puddicombe said, in the voice I knew so well. "We kind of started off thinking, 'How can we speak to our mates about this in a way that doesn't make them laugh?'" he explained when asked how he worked to offset skeptics who may think of mediation as flaky. "Obviously, when I came home from the monastery, dressed in my robes, people did laugh."

He began his quest to be a Tibetan monk at 22. By his early thirties, he was living in Moscow, teaching meditation to lay people. "I started to see that there's a way of talking about meditation that makes it relevant to the way most people live their lives now, and that's not necessarily the way it's conveyed when it's part of a broader cultural offering from another country and another time."

Maybe that's the conflict I'm picking up in his aura. He's part-monk, part-businessman, part-cool dude. After he gave up the monastic life upon his return to Britain, he studied circus arts for a while. His smile has a beatific quality to it – suggesting a peacefulness of mind – but there's a sort of laddish quality to it, too, and you can imagine him in a pub with his mates, talking about the soccer scores.

There's celibacy as a monk, I say at one point. Wasn't he happy to leave that behind?

"Yes, there's a lot of celibacy involved when you're a Buddhist," the 42 year-old says with his signature smile, before telling me that he had been in relationships before his journey into the hills. "And silence as well."

In part, he was happy to hang up the robes, because he had received what he had come for. "It's quite difficult to put into words," he begins. "I would say that the answer is not what I expected, but kind of when it came, it answered everything for me. But it's not like it's an answer that comes as a sign in the mind or as a bolt of lightning or anything like that.

"It is incredibly confronting to go and sit with oneself for many years," he says about his life as a monk. "There's a very romantic idea of sort of checking out of life and going to the hilltops. But it doesn't last long. It requires a real, almost like burning curiosity to discover why we torture ourselves in the way that we do. … You're sitting looking at the mind."

And? I lean forward a bit. What did he discover about the mind? He laughs a bit. "There is a degree of self-cherishing that we have in our minds, which leads to a great deal of unhappiness. We focus a lot on ourselves, whether it's emotional or material needs, and as soon as we let go of that and think, 'Okay, what can we do for others?,' you're much more happy as a result. So if I had to take the entire experience of 10 years and put it into two words or three, I would say, 'Be more kind.'"

I deflate a bit when he says this. I hear the kindness message so often, it makes me irritated – not exactly the desired outcome. Of course the world could use more kindness. But I feel that I have gone to the mountain, and the mountain has told me something I could find in my own backyard.

His most insightful moments come when he speaks of working with celebrities in Hollywood. "The main difference, I think, is they've worked very hard to project an image into the world to become who they are and what they do. And that is not always a true reflection of who they are and how they feel. The problem is, once they've projected into the world, then the world projects it back to them, that same image, and it's often very painful because then they feel a sense of responsibility to live up to that image. … They're kind of trapped."

But that was it.

I see why Puddicombe wants to come across as an everyday guy. He wants people to "take 10 minutes out of their day to look after their mind in the same way that they pick up a toothbrush to look after their teeth." He wants to normalize meditation – demystify it, derobe it, if you will.

But now when I listen to his voice on the app, guiding me through a meditation, I am wondering why I am letting some bald dude, who surfs a lot in Venice, Calif., where he now lives with his wife and infant son, take up so much space in my head.

Puddicombe enlightened me all right. Just not in the way I expected. I would have been better off, happier, calmer, if I had never met him.

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