Get Curious Before You Judge Yourself

(mouse button clicks) (gentle music) Headspace Studios. (calm music) Hi there, and welcome back to "Radio Headspace." It's Dora. So, I have a confession to make. A few months ago, one of my teachers gave me homework, and I didn't do it. Well, I tried, but let me explain. The assignment was simple. Increase my daily practice, sit a little longer, show up a little more consistently. That's it. Nothing wild. I teach meditation for a living, so you think this would be easy, right? Yeah, not so much. Every time I sat down to practice, my mind was all over the place, like more than usual, jumping from one thing to the next, unable to land anywhere. And instead of just letting that be what it was, I started to feel ashamed about it. I'm a meditation teacher. I teach this stuff. And here I am, unable to sit still for 30 minutes without my brain running off into 17 different directions. Anyone else been there, feeling bad about feeling bad? The shame I experienced was subtle and sneaky. What I didn't notice at first was that shame was taking up more space than the distraction had. It was pulling me further from my practice and further from the moment, further from myself. The thing I was trying to fix was getting worse, and the shame about it was doing the fixing, well, attempting to. I've shared this here before, but there's a teaching in Buddhism called the two arrows. The first arrow is what happens to you, the pain, the difficulty, the distraction, the thing you didn't want or didn't expect. The first arrow lands, and that's life. You can't always avoid it. The second arrow is what you do to yourself afterwards. The judgment, the story, the why "I can't get this right," the "what is wrong with me," the "I should be further along by now." The second arrow is the one we fire ourselves. And unlike the first, we do have some say in whether it lands. So, I mentioned this to my teacher in my next mentorship session, and she told me about a retreat she had been on years ago, where there was weeks of silence, structure, and intention. She said, "I was distracted the entire time. I couldn't land anywhere." And she kept wondering if she was doing it wrong. She found out afterward when the silence broke and people started talking that almost everyone in that room had felt the same way at some point. Everyone had struggled to stay present. Everyone had wondered if they were the only one. And yet, every single person had taken it personally in some way. And again, the distraction was the first arrow. The shame about the distraction was the second. And I had been so focused on treating the wound from the second arrow that I hadn't even stopped to feel what the first one was about. When I finally did, when I...