Headspace Studios.

Hi there, welcome to Radio Headspace, it's Dora.

So a few years ago, I was at a conference and after I finished speaking, someone came up to me.

They were super enthusiastic, eyes bright, clearly excited about getting started with meditation.

And they said something like, I'm really ready to start meditating.

I've been reading about how most successful people meditate, and I want to be more successful.

So I figured I should give it a try.

And I smiled, because I understood.

It's not a bad reason.

It's not wrong to want to be successful.

But something in me also paused, because what I heard underneath was, I'll meditate as long as it makes me successful.

And if it doesn't, I probably won't keep doing it. It was conditional. And that got me thinking

about intention, about the why behind the things we do.

Because our intention, our motivation, that's what controls our actions. And when our intention is

conditional, when it's based on getting something in return, we're setting ourselves up for a kind of

fragility.

The Buddha had this really beautiful teaching about this. He said that whatever we keep thinking about, whatever we keep turning over in our minds,

that becomes the inclination of our awareness.

Basically, whatever you focus on grows. Whatever you think about becomes what

you see everywhere. So if I'm constantly thinking about success, about achievement, about getting

ahead, then every action I take gets filtered through that lens. I start asking, will this make

me successful?

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