Simplify the Outside, Quiet the Mind

(mouse clicking) (soft music) Headspace Studios. (gentle music) Hi, my name's Andy, and welcome to Radio Headspace and to the start of the week. So are you the kind of person that does the same thing every day? Or are you someone who is constantly mixing things up, that every day is a little bit different and you're always looking for different ways to approach different things in your life? I have this situation in my life where my friends tease me a lot. I mean, for lots of reasons and with good reason, but they tease me because I tend to do the same things a lot of the time, and they joke that it's 'cause I'm institutionalized, kind of having been a monk and everything else. I wasn't there for that long. You know, I tend to have the same breakfast every day. I tend to have the same lunch every day. Tend to wear jeans and a white T-shirt every day. There are things that for me are just quite comfortable. And when I look back, even over the last however many years since leaving the monastery, I can probably see what they're saying. I think I wore a plaid shirt for about eight years after leaving the monastery and then a denim shirt for about another seven years. I find comfort in showing up the same way. And I have other friends as well who only wear black and they wear the same black things like every single day. Not goth, they're just, you know, creatives, and they like to wear black. And there's something in the simplicity of that. I feel there's so much choice in our life. There's so much going on in our life. Almost the busier things are, the more I crave that sense of simplicity. As I think back to the monastery and the way in which the day and even the year is set up actually, it's really defined by that idea. Every single day is the same, every single week, every single month, even to the extent, I mean, I remember kind of they gave us two hours off on Christmas day afternoon after lunch one year. But other than that, like it's the same all the time. And at first, that may sound very restrictive. It may sound very limiting. It may not feel as though there's a lot of room for spontaneity. But it depends how we think of spontaneity, whether we think about it as necessarily something active and something that needs to be expressed in the world, or whether we think about it as a quality of mind. And I would say that within that framework of simplicity, actually if anything encouraged more spontaneity of mind, it didn't need or didn't require necessarily any kind of sort of follow through on those things. It was more about that quality and maintaining and cultivating that spontaneous nature of mind. So very often, I think we might look...