How Repetition Deepens Meditation

Headspace Studios. Hi, my name's Andy and welcome to Radio Headspace. It's Monday morning and I dunno how you feel kind of going into the week. I feel very often there's a sense, even when you sort of look at the chatter on social media and everything else, it's like, oh, Monday's coming and it's like the same old thing back to work. There's a sense even before we kind of begin the week that there's gonna be sort of some repetition like we are going back to the same old thing as though the weekend is somehow a break for that. We don't think of the weekend in that way. Like, oh, it's just the weekend, it's always the week, and there's this sense of perhaps wanting something new and chatting to a person about this, they were saying that for them, they find meditation incredibly repetitive. It's not necessarily going into a week that they find repetitive, it's the act of sitting down and watching their breath. And as though this were sort of unusual, it's not. And perhaps they might be the only person who experienced that. Again, they're definitely not. A lot of people have that, and it's really important to understand sort of the value of repetition. So I'm talking about meditation, but really like this applies to every kind of part of our life. The reason that we strip away all of the distractions in our life is so that we can actually see more clearly. It's very, very difficult to focus on the breath when there's lots of things kind of going on around us or when we're engaged in other things. So we're really just trying to sort of create the most conducive conditions possible. And then when we do sit to meditate, we focus on the breath, we might think well it's just focusing on the breath again. Well one, yeah, we are showing up to focus on the breath, but the breath's not the same again. We might experience it that way, but if we do, then we are not really paying attention. If we are truly with each in breath and each out breath, there is no comparison to any other breath. And also the breath anyway will be different. So we can only think of it in terms of repetition if we are comparing it to another time in that session or on another day. It's really important that we're able to show up and have a place in which to sort of play, a place in which to watch. If we keep showing up in a different place, then there's no way of training the mind. There's no fixed context in which we can sort of get comfortable with, settle into and be undistracted. So although it may sound in some ways uninspiring that it's repetitive at times, it's only repetitive if we think about it. If we are truly being present, there is no idea. Repetitive...