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

As you look around, as you think around, the people, family, friends in your life, how

many of them are like-minded and how many have really sort of different views, opinions,

beliefs to you. Is there anyone within that circle who has opinions or beliefs that are

so radically different from you that you kind of find it almost impossible to understand

how they think the way that they do? There's an old phrase in meditation which is if we

can't learn to listen to our own thoughts, then how can we ever learn to listen to the

thoughts of others. And I feel like right now there's just not a lot of space for listening

to other people's thoughts. This is though we have decided, we've made up our mind, we

know which camp are in whatever that applies to in the world and we're going to stick to

it no matter what. And we're going to outwardly reject whatever anyone else says.

When we sit to meditate, there is a process, we're essentially training in witnessing the

thought without any bias. So thoughts arise, we're not chasing after them, we're not engaging

with them, we're not creating a story around them, we're not using those thoughts to either

reinforce our opinions or to reinforce our beliefs in any way. There is simply an acceptance

of the coming and going of thought, the stream of consciousness of the thinking mind.

We are simply witnessing it and in doing that, we start to see the thoughts more clearly,

we start to hear the thoughts more clearly. Sometimes it makes sense, it seems to make

sense to the rational mind, at other times it sounds like complete gibberish, complete

madness, but it doesn't matter, that's only really sort of retrospectively when we look

back at it. In that moment there is no judgment, there is no bias.

When you consider that training and how that might play out in the world, when you're

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