Stop Editing Yourself To Fit In

(digital blip) Headspace Studio. (bright music) (gentle music) Hi, welcome to Radio Headspace. It's Dora here. So, when I moved to LA, one of the things I was most excited about was being able to attend meditation sessions in person that I had only ever joined online. And I had been following this particular teacher for a while. Online, they were exactly what you might imagine, calm, measured, and grounded. The kind of presence that makes you feel like they've never once had a bad day. And then I walked into the room, and within about five minutes, they had made a joke at their own expense that made the whole room laugh. They were funny, genuinely, unexpectedly, delightly funny, and a little chaotic, and so completely, obviously human. And I remember sitting there thinking, "Oh, this changes everything." (gentle music continues) I think when a lot of us come to meditation, we have this idea that it comes with a certain aesthetic, a way of being. I though I needed to speak more softly or eat differently, curate myself into someone who looked the part. And what that teacher in LA reminded me just by being themselves in the room is that meditation doesn't ask you to become a different person, it asks you to become more of who you already are. (wind blows) (gentle music continues) For instance, I love hip hop. I love gangster rap. I say that with zero apology and a lot of joy. My older brother was into it when we were growing up and I wanted to be just like him, so I absorbed it and just became a part of me. I also played basketball for a very long time and hardcore rap was the music that got me into the zone. Sometimes before I go out to teach a meditation class or give a talk, I'll put on a rap playlist just to hype myself up, in my car or backstage somewhere, listening to something that most people would not associate with mindfulness at all. And then I walk out and guide people into stillness. Man, honestly, it works every time. However, when I was newer to practice, I tried to stop listening to that music. I though it didn't fit. And what I found pretty quickly was that I was just performing a version of a meditator rather than actually being one. The music was never the problem, the self-consciousness was. The teachers who have moved me most over the years are the ones who are most fully themselves, the ones who laugh too hard at their own jokes and admit they're struggling and have complicated taste in music and movies and life. Those are the people I trust. Those are the people whose teachings actually land. (water gurgles) (gentle music continues) So if you've been editing yourself since you started practicing, putting certain things away, turning down parts of yourself that don't seem to fit, I want to offer you a gentle...