Hi, my name is Andy and welcome to Radiohead Space and a Thursday morning.

So there were a lot of misconceptions and preconceptions that exist around meditation, mindfulness

and training the mind.

And I think one of the most prevalent is that by training the mind, we are somehow subduing

emotions, we're somehow cancelling them out, getting rid of them.

And in fairness, when I went away to become a monk, there was a little bit inside of me

that thought, just that.

I thought I could go away and I could basically get rid of all the unpleasant emotions in

my mind.

And in having done that, I would never have to experience them again, which is a somewhat

naive thought.

A nice thought, but somewhat naive thought.

Of course, as human beings, it doesn't matter whether we train our minds or not.

We're still going to experience human emotions.

It's part of living in the human realm.

It's part of this sort of shared condition.

I have people genuinely say to me, they're worried that they just turn into this sort of

grey, emotionless blob and not necessarily experienced life.

But if you think about what we're doing in training the mind, we're training awareness.

So we can only become more aware of things, that means we've become more aware of our sadness,

we've become more aware of our happiness.

We've become more aware, hopefully, of our entirety of mind, if you like.

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