Headspace Studios.

Hi, it's Dora here, and welcome to Radio Headspace.

Now, when I tell people that I'm a mindfulness teacher at Headspace, one of the first

responses I hear is something like, oh, meditation isn't for me. And before I even ask why,

they usually followed up with a confession. My mind is too restless. I can never make it still.

I tried it once, and I'm just such a bad meditator.

And the funny thing is, these confessions are almost always made completely unprovoked.

But they're incredibly common. So common in fact that I remember having the exact same thought

when I first started meditating. When I first began practicing, I remember having the exact same thought when I first started meditating.

When I first began practicing, I remember sitting down, closing my eyes, and almost immediately

thinking, I am terrible at this.

My mind was everywhere, planning what I was going to eat later, replaying conversations from

the day before, thinking about what

I should be doing instead of sitting here.

And I thought meditation was supposed to make me calm.

But what I didn't realize at the time was how revealing the practice would be.

Because meditation didn't immediately make my mind calmer. First, it showed me how restless

my mind already was. And that was a bit of a surprise. In Buddhist teachings, there's a phrase used

to describe the nature of the mind, which is the monkey mind.

It's the restless, unsettled state of mind that jumps from thought to thought,

just like a monkey swinging from vine to vine.

And when we first sit down to meditate, that monkey mind suddenly becomes very obvious.

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