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

A couple of days ago I was doing a podcast and someone asked me an interesting question

and it's a question that I've heard before but phrases it was made me reflect on it a little

more I guess and the question was someone does headspace on meditation on an app but what do they

do when they then want to become spiritual or they want to go on and become enlightened or something

like that and it kind of caught me by surprise in so much as I've never really thought about it in

terms of a leveling up or a graduation in that way in fact I find the idea of separating life out

in that way quite alien in some ways and it kind of begs a question of what do we mean

when we talk about the idea of spiritual for some people it's comfortable language for some

people it's very uncomfortable language I feel like for most people it's a way of differentiating

consciousness from a journey in a particular religious sort of thing but trying to take ourselves

out of our everyday life it's like okay I'm aware of something bigger than myself and yet it's

not tied to a particular journey from a meditation point of view or just in terms of training the

mind actually when we train the mind we're kind of unpacking the mind rather than adding labels

and putting new labels on ourselves we're taking labels off we're letting go of the identity

in the story we have around us so the idea of putting a new badge on saying right now I'm a

spiritual person or I'm on a spiritual journey yes there's some maybe a little bit of tension there

you know it's interesting kind of whether we are using an app whether we're not whether we're

having guidance whether we're sitting in silence whether we have a reflective practice a

contemplative practice or whatever it might be the essence of it is to be present in this moment

that's it there's not something more we might think yeah but what about other aspects of

consciousness well we can't experience other aspects of consciousness unless we are in this moment

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