Hi, it's Andy here, and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Friday Morning.
And not just any old Friday Morning, this is our 100th episode.
So thank you so much if you've been listening to Radio Headspace all this time, or if you've
been spreading the word, I hope it has been in some way useful in your life.
On the note of appreciation and gratefulness, I think there is sometimes a tendency to get
so caught up in what we're doing in life that we don't always have the opportunity to
stop, to say thank you to the people.
We care about maybe sometimes the people we don't even know.
And I was recounting a story a few days back, as for a show we're making on something.
And I was asked to think back to a time where life had stopped to such an extent that I
was truly able to feel that sense of appreciation.
And I was talking about a time, I won't surprise you in the monastery, where I guess the conditions
there are such that you don't only slow down physically, but the mind also slows down.
And so you get to a point where there is room for these qualities in the mind.
And personally I feel they are ever present qualities, they're not something that we go
and find and discover.
It's just in the absence of noise, in the absence of the thinking mind, we experience more
directly those qualities.
And one day for whatever reason, as I sat there, the mind went quiet.
And I experienced a level of appreciation that I had never experienced in my life.
There was nothing mystical about it, it was appreciation.
It was in some ways one of the most fundamental sort of human aspects of the mind.
And yet I found myself incredibly moved by it tears sort of rolling down my cheeks.
And in my mind, experiencing just fleeting moments, flashes of things that had happened
in my life.
The good things that had happened, the places I'd been, people who'd said nice things.
People who'd been supportive.
It was as though they were all there, it was all stored up in this bank.
And as they flashed by it, just encouraged that sense of feeling, almost sort of connected
in some way, all those different thoughts and feelings.
In the monastery, it's tricky because on the one hand you want to be able to say thank
you to the people who've done things for you.
In your life, you've said things for you in your life.
In the end of the monastery, you can't sit there writing letters all day long.
In fact, they say if you are going to write home from retreat, everything that you write
to fit on the back of a post is stem, which doesn't leave a lot of room.
And it's true in every part of life, right?
So often we don't have the opportunity.
Maybe it's distance, maybe it's a family member or friend who's passed away who has done
a lot for us, who we feel a deep sense of appreciation towards but who we're not able
to necessarily express that directly to.
But sometimes it's enough to feel that in our mind, to allow that to be part of who
we are and to bring that into the world.
If I may be sometimes that's even more valuable, they'd shared by more people.
In that moment myself, I did actually write a cheeky little note to my mum.
I was never very good at following rules and I knew that someone was coming to the retreat
sort of in the next few days to drop off some food and I thought, well, I'll leave the
letter outside and hopefully I'll take it.
And I took the opportunity to write down all the things that I was grateful for and thankful
for over the years.
And that's a letter that I don't know, 25 years later my mum still refers to.
So if you take anything away from today, my hope is that it will be to pause for long
enough.
And I'd like to say thank you to the person or the people who you care about most in
life.
And on that note, I'd like to say thank you to you and to express my appreciation again
for you tuning in every single day.
Thanks as always for listening.
I'm going to take a short while off.
We've just done 100 episodes in a row.
But while I'm gone, we'll be playing some of the very best of radio headspace.
Thanks again for listening and I look forward to seeing you back here soon.
