Resetting the Mind Through Meditation

(sand shaking) (mouse clicking) (peaceful music) Headspace Studio. Hi, it's Andy here, and welcome to Radio Headspace and a Tuesday morning. So there's happen to been a few times on Radio Headspace where we've looked at the idea of sort of identity and how you see yourself and I used to work with a lot of people one to one and there was one clinic that I worked at it was actually with groups at a time, but it was for professional athletes. It was professional athletes who struggled with addiction for all kinds of different reasons. It might have been alcohol, it might have been drugs, it was sex addiction. And anyway, within that world of professional sport especially athletes of a young age where they come from a background where they're not necessarily a customer who would be accustomed to suddenly coming into those kinds of riches and that kind of environment it's a really challenging thing. But every now and again, an older athlete, sometimes even a retired athlete would come through the clinic. And I remember speaking to one and he'd started drinking and he was, you know, quite depressed. And there was a time where, you know he played for one of the best clubs in the country, played for the national team, and you know he was a really well respected footballer. And people would come up to him on the street and you know they'd be asking for his autograph and long before the days of selfies and everything else. But there was a sense for him constantly being projected toward him that he was sort of something different, something unusual, something special within the world in which he lived. And as he'd got older that had slowly slipped away sometimes, occasionally it does continue but more often than not, it happens. Or over time, people maybe kind of forget those days and the person starts to look a little bit different and they don't necessarily receive the same amount of adulation or praise, whatever it might be. And I think people project one thing into the world, it's projected back, and then they realize you have to keep up that projection in order to satisfy kind of what they've already put out into the world. And that can be really exhausting. And I think that happens to some degree in all areas of life for all of us at some stages in our life where we put things out there, we see how they land, and in response, there is either a sense of praise or criticism and we in turn then adjust our behavior. The challenge with this is that we are not really showing up as ourselves. We're continually sort of modifying our behavior based on the signals that we're getting from outside. The thing I love about meditation, the thing I love about training the mind is that really it's resetting everything. Every day when you sit down, you kinda...