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

I don't know if you're learning any new skills at the moment, I know lots of people have

been learning lots of new things over the last six months, especially when lockdown

was sort of prevalent everywhere, lots of people were writing on social media about new

things they were learning. I was chatting to a friend, a good friend the other day, whose

son is learning to play the piano. And they said like before Covid happened, he would

go along and he would learn to play the piano, so he'd have a lesson once a week. And

that was working well for him, he was learning and they thought sort of after Covid, how

were they going to catch up? Because he hadn't had any lessons for a long time and they

were thinking of sort of going to multiple lessons a week. And it reminded me of a time in

the monastery, several different monasteries. If you're wondering where I'm going with

this and how we've just jumped from a piano lesson to the monastery, this is about the

nature of advice, how much is useful and how much is actually harmful and is there

somewhere between the two where we can benefit from the advice of somebody who has walked

that path before, who's learnt that skill before, and yet at the same time find sort of

a balance if you like, where we're actually curious and interested enough ourselves in

the process, that we are learning the skill alongside that advice.

Because when I think back, I can think of one monastery where I would see the teacher

every single day, ten minutes scheduled every single afternoon. And there was benefit to

that, it was kind of nice to touch base at the same time. There was maybe not enough had happened

in that period of time to really discuss a lot. And it also set up an expectation that there

should be something that had happened within that period of time. I felt like I couldn't keep

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