I'm Amanda Knox and you're listening to Hard Knocks.

Happy New Year's and welcome to Hard Knocks.

Today I'm going to be discussing the idea of beginning again. And to help me with this discussion, I've invited my lovely husband, Chris, to join me as he is my partner in all things creative and philosophical and everything really.

Hello. So the idea for this discussion is inspired by the fact that since the beginning of the year,

I have begun again in my meditation practice.

That isn't to say that it stopped or anything, but I'm going back to the original introductory

meditation course that got me truly into meditation for

this successfully for the first time. Like I had tried meditation before using the waking up

app and I hadn't had success. And this introductory course was so gentle and so straightforward.

And I wanted to return to it just to go back to

the base principles and rediscover anything new about being a practitioner of meditation

in light now of many years of practice and see if anything, you know, brought up

anything in me just, I don't know, it seemed like a good idea to begin again.

That's a notion that you hear a lot in meditation and particularly in the tradition that I

take part in, which is Zen practice.

And so that's what we'll be discussing today. I think one thing that, what do we mean by begin again? Okay. So it's really, I mean,

it's again, these ideas are really deceptively simple.

It means that at any given moment, if you find yourself sort of caught up in a thought or caught up in an emotion or caught up in an argument you're having or just whatever,

whatever it is that you are caught up in all the time because we are constantly

caught up in stuff, you can just stop and start over.

You can't, you don't, you're not a slave to the momentum of your past.

And your past is not something that predetermines your present or your future is this idea that like

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