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

Question for you, when you go on holiday, are you the kind of person who can immediately

switch off, relax and sort of settle into your new environment?

Would you tend to find that at least for the first few days or so, that thoughts continue?

When you go to bed, do you immediately fall asleep as soon as your head hits the pillar?

Or are you someone who sort of lies there and all the thoughts of the day sort of come

up and sometimes it can even get in the way of you falling asleep if you do meditate?

Are you someone who immediately sort of settles in?

It's all essentially the same thing of course, is there is a sense of wanting to reach a state

of relaxation, a little quicker, or perhaps even as quickly as possible.

And for most of us, that's simply not how the body works, it's not how the mind works.

There's a certain amount of momentum that happens in our life when we are called up with

the busyness of life, the stress of life, it sort of accumulates and it's perhaps a little

unrealistic to expect it to immediately cease as soon as we sit down to meditate or lie

down at night or go on holiday.

So it's really helpful to think about this as you approach different parts of your life

where you have the room and the opportunity to experience a calm mind and less sort of

tension in the body.

When you sit to meditate rather than thinking that, okay, I need to do this as quickly as

possible and why isn't it happening?

That's all thinking, that's all effort, is the opposite of letting go, there is no room

for relaxation.

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