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

As you practice meditation or mindfulness, I'm assuming that you do in some way, you may

not, you may just tune into Radio Headspace.

He's there, assuming that you do some kind of practice like that.

I think there is a tendency to add another layer on top of that.

That's the tendency to try and live a certain way.

So the most basic level we're simply cultivating awareness and compassion.

But I think that comes with added stuff.

Maybe we think we need to dress a certain way or we need to eat a certain way or we need

to like certain types of things and not like other things.

And I think that can be really unhelpful.

Actually, I think you can really start to shrink the world we live in and actually limit

the world we live in.

The idea of awareness is not that we shut things out, it's more that we open up, that

we see things clearly.

And in seeing them more clearly, we start to understand what's helpful, what's unhelpful.

I was reminded this by a teacher of mine, teacher from quite a while back who trained

himself at that same monastery.

And he had just come out of a very long retreat.

He'd been in there for about four years.

I think he had about a month or six weeks before going back in for another four years,

which is a long stretch by anyone's standards.

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