Hi, it's Andy here and welcome to Radio Headspace until Wednesday morning.

Now I've said in the past one of the lovely things about doing the work that I do is

that I get to hear from so many people about their experience, not just their meditation

but more broadly in their life as well and I hear the most incredible stories, but I also

get to hear from a lot of people about the challenges they have and more specifically

the challenges they have with their mind, more specifically still within the meditation.

And there are so many people who feel that either they can't meditate, they feel that

bad at meditating, maybe meditation isn't for them, maybe they're doing the wrong meditation,

maybe meditation doesn't work at all.

I hear so many of these different bits of feedback and I was looking at it sort of as a whole,

you know, I don't think it's really about the meditation for what it's worth.

Let's take a technique like focus detention for example, where we're just focusing on

the breath, the body is breathing, the body does its own thing, we don't really need

to worry too much about that.

Our ability to focus of course we're going to be distracted a lot to begin with, that's

the learning of the skill and it's a lifelong journey so we should be okay with that.

Of course thoughts are going to continue to come and go so the technique itself is just

the technique, nothing too special about it.

What really defines the outcome and the experience is our approach.

So if we are showing up to the meditation thinking it's about stopping thoughts then of course

it's frustrating.

If when a thought arises in the mind we're very critical and harsh and judgmental towards

...