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

So are the middle of the week, and I don't know whether you're learning anything new

at the moment, whether you have been learning something new during lockdown over these

recent months.

Whenever we're learning something new, I'm always fascinated by the idea of how we judge

progress, but also why we even feel the need to judge progress and whether we measure

our success, not by how much enjoyment we're getting in the moment, but how much we're

comparing it to an ideal that we would like to reach in terms of our skill or our ability

in the future.

And as someone who teaches guiding people in meditation, it's something I hear a lot.

I hear people saying, I'm no good at meditating.

You know, I say, what do you mean by, you're no good at it?

I said, well, I still have thoughts on I would be sure, of course, that's part of meditation.

Thoughts are part of meditation.

They're like, oh, okay, well, I get distracted all the time, all right?

Well, sure.

Distractions, part of meditation, of course, you get distracted.

And so there are all these fixed ideas of what people think meditation should be, and

therefore their assumption is that they are no good at it.

It's not even that they're working towards a specific kind of point, they're working towards

an idea of a specific point in their mind.

Same is true, I think, in cooking, playing a musical instrument, all kinds of other

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