Hi, my name is Andy and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Thursday morning.

A few days back I got an email from somebody in the headspace community who had been using

meditation as a way of feeling more comfortable in giving talks in her workplace.

And she didn't say in the email but I suspect the idea was that if she practiced meditation

she would lose any fear and therefore feel very sort of confident.

And I think there's quite a common way of thinking about meditation that somehow it's

going to get rid of the thing that we don't like in our mind and in turn it's going to

leave us free to express ourselves as we might like to in life.

It's interesting she said that the advice that she had had in her workplace was to not

worry too much about it but to just be herself.

And I feel like that's advice we've all received in our life over time.

Just go and be herself.

She said the problem with this advice and just being herself was it was terrifying.

And again I think for most of us at some stage in our life we will have had that feeling

to be vulnerable to expose herself in that way.

There's something sort of terrifying about it and we might think that meditation can

somehow eliminate that fear.

But what it's really saying is can we find a way in being present with that fear?

So it's not that we're getting rid of the terror.

We're getting more comfortable with the terror.

We're actually willing to put ourselves in a position where there is fear, where there

is anxiety in the mind but we're not running away from it.

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