Hi it's Andy here and welcome to Radio Headspace. So last night I was having dinner with my two

little boys and we go through a fairly regular process every evening where my wife cooks

them vegetables and everything else and they tend to just leave them on the side of the plate.

Certainly when I was younger we weren't allowed to leave the table till we'd eat and everything

else and I'm in favour of that to some degree but I also want to encourage a genuine natural

curiosity rather than sprawling by fear. You know I always say to the boys maybe just try a little

bit, maybe like no no no I don't like it it's green I'm like but you haven't even tried it before

anyway we go through this most evenings it's fair to say. It's interesting I think very often

in life. One we're not always open to trying new things but also very often we have made up our

mind about something and we don't really have a lot of interest in changing our mind about that

thing and it reminded me of a particular place I stayed in it was a monastery retreat like most

of the places I've stayed in my life it was quite an unusual one once it was unconventional

but it was almost like it evolved a little bit anyway as I began my time there I was asked by

the monk who had gone in before me so there's quite a strict sort of hierarchy there every

monk that had gone in before you was essentially sort of a senior to you. He asked me can you just

tell me sort of any foods that you don't like and I'd come from other monasteries where you get

a bowl of rice and curried vegetables and was thinking this is amazing what they're actually

asking and what foods I don't like so they're just going to give me the foods that I do like

at that time yeah I'd done so much sport going into the monastery I was still in that frame of

mind where I didn't really sort of eat a lot of chocolate or cookies or stuff like that I didn't

really want to be around that sort of stuff at that time you know I wrote down I wrote down this

list of stuff that I didn't like coffee and there was cake and there was chocolate and these weren't

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