Pay Attention

(gentle music) Hi, my name's Andy and welcome to Radio Headspace on the Thursday morning. A few days back I was doing an interview and we were talking about the movement of meditation, of mindfulness from east to west over the last few decades or so. And we were talking about the elements that have worked very well and perhaps the elements that hadn't worked so well, the things that had been included and the things that had been missed out. And I thought that one of the elements that had been most ignored was that of compassion, perhaps a sense of joy. In the West, I feel meditation and mindfulness often presented as a way of increasing our focus, our attention, our awareness, all really important things, of course. But there's this other element of mine which is equally important. And if we think about how we live our lives, whilst we would all probably like to be a lot more present, a lot less distracted, unless we are a lot more present with a soft, kind, friendly, joyous mind, then I think life is always gonna feel like we're missing some element. And it was interesting to think about that transition from east to west. I went off at quite an early age and studied in meditation and in those earlier years there was definitely a big focus on attention, on concentration and on developing that ability to be not as distracted. And yet I felt throughout that training that whilst I felt more present, I didn't necessarily feel like I had those other qualities. I wasn't necessarily sitting there with a sense of joy, a sense of limitless compassion or unconditional love, there was a sense that something was still missing. I actually made that journey from east to west to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Scotland and it was there that I met a teacher. So I remember sitting down in front of this teacher and he called that out. He said, "Look, you know, you spent all these years sitting there very seriously, sort of focusing the mind." He said, "But your mind is like a dog with a very strict donor and maybe there's a sense of fear there. There's no freedom, there's no playfulness in the mind." As I looked at this teacher, the thing that stood out actually was not his degree of concentration or focus, it was his sense of warmth, it was his sense of ease, his laughter, his playfulness. And I feel very often those are the qualities that we don't really talk about so much in meditation, in mindfulness, but arguably, they're some of the most important because they are the ones that allow us not only to feel more comfortable with ourselves, towards ourselves, but also with others, and towards others. So whatever form your mindfulness might take, whatever form you might think of training the mind or looking after the mind in some way, just try...