Hi, I'm Andy and welcome to Radio Headspace. So it's Thursday morning and today is World
Meditation Day. I don't know about you, I'm not too sure about these days. There seem
to be days for everything. I love the fact that they put world in front of it as well as
though one nation or one town might try and own it. It's not a bad thing though, I think it's
good to bring awareness to these things and look, as someone who has been an advocate and spent
their last, I don't know, I've probably spent the last 15 years or so, encouraging people to meditate.
Obviously, I'm happy to see it being celebrated around the world. But it does make me think as
important as meditation is and it is really important to take some time out each day. At the same
time, it's still a small amount of time and let's say we do 10 minutes or 15 minutes in the day.
There's still another 23 hours plus in the day that we need to sort of try and bring a degree of
awareness, compassion, however you like to think of it to the day. And I know the last couple
of days I've given you stories from the monastery but having spent quite a bit of time there
is where my mind naturally goes for these stories and so today I have yet another one from the
monastery but that I hope will feel kind of relevant for you. And there was one particular
monastery I went to. I mean, as monastery's guy, it was, it was pretty hard line to be fair.
I went there thinking that I was going to spend all my time sitting in Lotus, meditating and
I guess in search him in my own sort of naive way at a very young age, sort of in search of
enlightenment. And when I got there, I realized that actually that wasn't quite how the monastery ran,
you know, we get, I think it was about eight hours a day of meditation, something like that.
Not a huge amount, the rest of the time was spent cooking and cleaning and gardening and doing
lots of other things. One day I was asked to cut the grass. Now I'd been down to the end of the
garden and I'd looked in the shed and there was a lawnmower in there. I knew that. So I was
actually quite looking forward to it but then I was handy at a pair of scissors and I kid you not,
the size of the grass, it was probably not too much smaller than sort of the size of a tennis court.
I looked at the guy sort of in disbelief and he was like, yeah, no, just, you know, you can just
use the scissors and just sort of trim it and try and sort of keep it all sort of in line. So once
I got past this stage of disbelief and I'd got down on my knees, I started cutting the grass and
it's one of those moments where kind of not sure whether, you know, is it a prank, you know,
is this sort of a test. Then after a while a few hours go by and you realize, oh no, this is actually
what's happening. And I can remember after a while thinking that my knees were getting a bit,
man, a little bit sore. My back was getting a bit sore. In my mind, I started this sort of inner
dialogue of, you know, this is crazy. What am I doing? There's a lawnmower in the show. Why,
why did I just get the lawnmower? And I started sort of this slow, steady build of thought.
We started to bring on the onset of perhaps a bit of frustration and irritability,
leading to a bit of anger. I carried on for the rest of the day and it wasn't until I went back
into my room later that evening that I sort of looked back at that and I thought, wow, actually,
I really got lost. I completely didn't see my mind wandering off. I went with it and as a
consequence, the emotion built and I found myself in a really uncomfortable, difficult state.
I actually had the opportunity in that moment to see that my thoughts were getting very distracted,
that I was getting caught up in it and actually to enjoy what I was doing. I was outside,
I was in the sun. I didn't have anywhere to go. I didn't have anything to do. I didn't have
any responsibility. It was actually a really nice job and I tried it again later and I actually,
you know, I didn't mind it at all. The temptation, I think, is to think that only in meditation
can we see that happening and that in the rest of life, maybe that's not so relevant.
But I would say, and through my experience, it doesn't matter what we're doing. If we can bring
the quality of awareness and attention to what we're doing, whether we're walking down the street,
whether we're sitting chatting with a friend, whether we're listening to a piece of music,
doing something at work, whatever it is, it's in bringing our attention and our awareness to that
moment. That is the quality of meditation. Of course, we still practice meditation because it helps
train that muscle. It helps familiarize ourselves with what it means to be present. But ultimately,
we want to find that in every moment of our life. So I hope you can bring a little bit of that
into your day today. Thanks for listening. I look forward to seeing you back here tomorrow.
