Hello, Sam here. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Tuesday.

So it can be difficult to explain some of the more abstract elements of mindfulness,

especially to children. When I teach children, I rely on symbols for different modes of thinking and responding.

So for example, I tell children that we have a wise owl part of our brain that thinks things through

and decides how to respond instead of react. The wise owl represents our prefrontal cortex,

responsible for executive functioning. Mindfulness practices introduce a radical shift

in habitual ways of responding to our inner experience. So we rely heavily on metaphors,

using imagery like the blue sky and talking about the mind like a vast landscape.

And this works for adults too. So I want to share some metaphors that help me understand mindfulness concepts,

and hopefully they'll give you a better understanding as well.

One of the first mindfulness metaphors that I learned was when I was introduced to mindfulness

by my teacher Diana Winston, who's the director of UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center.

She described watching thoughts like watching trains pass by. Some trains are fast and flash by an instant,

and others are slow and just keep showing up. She told me to expect my mind to jump on the train often,

and that catching my mind when it hops on the train and coming back to observing

is a moment of mindfulness. And this metaphor worked really well for me.

Sometimes I would immediately catch myself getting on the train,

and other times I'd be lost on my train of thought for a while before catching it.

In his book From Wild Chickens and Petty Tyrants,

Psychologist Arnold Kozak offers 108 metaphors for mindfulness.

One of the most widely understood metaphors is that of the inner witness.

By imagining that we have an inner witness to our experiences,

...