Hi, my name is Andy and welcome to Radio Headspace and a Thursday morning.

A few days back I was doing an interview and we were talking about the movement of meditation,

mindfulness from east to west over the last few decades or so and we were talking about the

elements that have worked very well and perhaps the elements that hadn't worked so well. The things

that have been included and the things that have been missed out and I thought that one of the

elements that had been most ignored was that of compassion. Perhaps the sense of joy in the west

I feel meditation and mindfulness often presented as a way of increasing our focus, our attention,

our awareness, all really important things of course but there's this other element of mine which

is equally important and if we think about how we live our lives whilst we would all probably

like to be a lot more present, a lot less distracted and unless we are a lot more present with a

soft, kind, friendly, joyous mind then I think life is always going to feel like we're missing

some element and it was interesting to think about that transition from east to west.

I went off quite an early age and studied in meditation and in those earlier years there was

definitely a big focus on attention, on concentration and on developing that ability to be not as distracted

and yet I felt throughout that training that whilst I felt more present I didn't necessarily

feel like I had those other qualities. I wasn't necessarily sitting there with a sense of joy,

a sense of limitless compassion or unconditional love though as a sense that something was still missing.

I actually made that journey from east to west towards a better Buddhist monastery in Scotland

and it was there that I met a teacher so I remember sitting down in front of this teacher and he

called that out he said look you know he spent all these years sitting there very seriously sort of

focusing the mind he said but your mind is like a dog with a very strict owner maybe there's a

sense of fear there there's no freedom there's no playfulness in the mind as I looked at this teacher

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