Hi, it's Andy here and welcome to Radio Headspace. Wednesday morning. A little while back, I was

chatting with a friend and she was giving herself quite a tough time. I think we often give ourselves

quite a tough time. Just as a general idea I think if we treated ourselves and spoke to ourselves

internally, in the same way that we might speak to a kind friend or someone we really kind of

care about, I feel like just generally we'd probably be a lot happier in life. Anyway, we were chatting

and she was describing a pattern of behaviour that had really kind of been present for a large part

of her life and she was talking about her frustration with how it seemed to keep happening.

She was aware of it so she was aware of the behaviour but wasn't necessarily aware of it happening

at the time so wasn't necessarily able to step out of it. And it reminded me of her a story

that I was told back in the monastery and one that's really sort of stuck with me over the years

and they were talking about it as though we're walking down a street and at the end of this street

is a big hole in the road. We're so used to just sort of walking down this street and falling

down the hole that we don't really think too much about it. And even though we do it every day

or every week we don't necessarily make the connection. Over time as we start training the mind

we start to become more aware of what's kind of happening and not suggesting we avoid the whole

straight away. Next time we might walk down the street and we see the hole we kind of know where

we're headed in our mind. We know we might be going to those habitual places of anxiety or

anger or whatever it might be. We see it and yet the route is so habitual we are so conditioned to

walking straight down that street that regardless we just end up falling in the hole but at least now

we saw it before we fell in. As we continue training the mind we start to see it with a bit more

clarity and we start to understand well if I just carry on in the same direction I'm going to

fall down that hole and we realize that actually there's the opportunity to stop before we get to

...