Hi, I'm Andy and welcome to Radio Headspace and the Friday morning.

Depending what stage of life you're in right now, what's going on in your life right

now, you'll have a certain number of stresses going on.

I remember going to a counsellor therapist when I was pretty young.

I was probably 18 or something like that.

Having a really tough time and of course eventually I went off to become a monk,

but at the time I didn't know how to deal with my thoughts and I really needed some help.

And I remember him asking me, he said, how do you think about struggling with your thoughts

and stress in life?

He said, just over the period of a lifetime, do you think it gets more difficult?

Do you think it gets more easy?

I said, I'm really thought about it too much and he had a pen and a piece of paper and he said,

just draw on me. He said, maybe it's a straight line up, maybe it's a straight line down,

maybe it's a banana, just draw a line for me and I thought about it and I thought, well,

it actually felt quite difficult actually being a teenager and stuff.

So that bit of life was quite easy and it wasn't a steep line up, it was a steady line up.

I was looking ahead and I thought, well, probably the middle of the years,

they're probably fairly straightforward, there's probably not a lot of stress.

That line was kind of flat in the middle and then I thought, well, probably, as you get older,

you've got wisdom and everything else and it's probably not that much to stress about to be honest

and so the line was going down, so essentially it sort of looked like a bridge.

And he looked at it and obviously laughed in a nice way in an horrible way and then we talked

...