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

Welcome to Monday, the start of the week.

I thought today, there's no particular story, there's more of an idea, and it's a really,

really important idea.

It's been so central to my learning and understanding of the mind, and it's something I thought

might be helpful to share.

It's an idea that comes from, well, this phrase comes from the Zen tradition, big mind,

small mind.

I learned about it when I was training as a Tibetan Buddhist monk.

There were two different ways of sort of looking at the world.

On the one hand, you have high perspective of life.

It's almost like the view of an eagle flying over the mountains.

It's able to take in everything and everyone, and because we have that perspective, we tend

not to sort of get so caught up in all the comings and goings of life, and we tend not

to get so caught up in sort of the negativities and the habitual patterns of the mind.

At the same time, they talked about everything being vitally important, that we should pay

so much attention to them, our attention should be as fine as every single grain of sand

on a beach.

It's interesting.

At first, you hear those two different things like, how can we live with both?

How can we be paying attention to everything with such fine detail, and at the same time,

maintain the sense of perspective?

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