Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus. I'm your host, Thomas McConkey. Thanks for joining us today.

For those of you who are new to the show, each week I work with a basic concept or teaching

related to mindfulness, related to meditation, related to human growth and transformation.

So I draw from the wisdom traditions, often Buddhism,

and I also draw from modern developmental psychology,

anything that can help give us some insight into

how paying attention in a particular way can help us be happier, more joyful, more successful

and effective human beings. Today, the topic is beginner's mind. So many of you listening will

have a lot of familiarity with this concept and hopefully some familiarity with

the experience of beginner's mind. I want to talk about the concept for a moment, share an

example of it, and then we're just going to get right into practice as we do on this show

Mindfulness Plus. So first the phrase beginner's mind.

This is translated from the original Chinese, which is Chu Xin.

So I've been a long time student of Chinese and spent many years in China.

I'm not academically trained, but I've got a good gut feel for what these characters mean.

And I will say that beginner's mind is a beautiful translation.

And it also can create the impression that beginner's mind means there's a person

who has a certain quality of mind and that you bring that quality of mind to a given

moment, that's beginner's mind. So this is an important aspect of beginner's mind, but really if we

go to the original characters, Chu Xin, there's not actually a person implied. So when we say Chu, this character,

it points to a newness, a kind of budding new growth and emergence in the world. Think of a little

spring bud on a tree just peeking out with its bright

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