Hi, it's Andy here and welcome to Radio Headspace. So in the middle of the week and a couple

of days back I was on a panel. Someone was facilitating a discussion and interview

and they were asking me how I saw mindfulness in the West, how it was different to where I was taught

out in the East. I think that generally, even separating out West and East is a bit of a

red herring because that's not really the experience. I think there was the life in the monastery

and then there was the life people were living in the rest of the country at the time and

the same kind of goes for the West as well. But I do see some very real differences in the

way that mindfulness is maybe understood in the West and I think in more recent years it's been

applied to areas of attention and focus and productivity. And it's not that it's not helpful for

those things, it's brilliant for all of those things. But it kind of ignores a really important

component which I think isn't talked about as much and that's compassion. Traditionally if you

look at mindfulness there's kind of two components to it. The awareness part of it which is more about

the curiosity, the open mind, paying attention, being present and then there's the sort of the

compassion part of it. Yeah we're more receptive, we're less judgmental, less critical, perhaps a

little kinder in our mind. And for me those two things, they can't really live without one another.

We can lean heavily into one more than the other but they're kind of ultimately one and the same

thing. I always think of it a little bit like the Sun. The awareness is the brightness,

it's the clarity, it allows us to see more clearly. But the Sun also has the warmth and that warmth,

that's the kindness, the love in our mind in our life. And we need both whether we're practicing

training the mind in some way or whether we're just trying to live life more skillfully.

It's really easy to think about it in just one of those camps and to maybe not train both equally.

You might think that well if we're just being more present aren't we automatically more compassionate

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