This Actually Helped My Anxiety, with Andy Puddicombe

(item hisses) (mouse clicks) (soft bright ethereal music) Headspace Studios. (soft bright music) Hi, my name's Andy, and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Thursday morning. A few days back, I got an email from somebody in the Headspace community who had been using meditation as a way of feeling more comfortable in giving talks in her workplace, and she didn't say in the email, but I suspect the idea was that if she practiced meditation, she would lose any fear and therefore feel very sort of confident. And I think that's quite a common way of thinking about meditation, that somehow it's gonna get rid of the thing that we don't like in our mind, and, in turn, it's gonna leave us free to express ourselves as we might like to in life. It's interesting. She said that the advice that she had had in her workplace was to not worry too much about it but to just be herself, and I feel like that's advice we've all received in our life over time. Just go and be yourself. She said the problem with this advice and just being herself was it was terrifying, and again, I think for most of us at some stage in our life, we will have had that feeling. To be vulnerable, to expose ourself in that way, there's something sort of terrifying about it, and we might think that meditation can somehow eliminate that fear. But what it's really saying is can we find a way in being present with that fear? So it's not that we're getting rid (laughs) of the terror. We're getting more comfortable with the terror. We're actually willing to put ourselves in a position where there is fear, where there is anxiety in the mind, but we're not running away from it. We're not trying to block it out. We're not getting involved in it. We are simply present with it, and it reminded me of the difference between acting mindful and being mindful. You know, when I went to my first monastery, when I look back now, I think what I became good at was less on being focused in my mind. I learned how to walk very slowly. I learned how to eat very slowly. I learned how to sit for long periods of time with my legs tangled up. Those outward actions and behaviors were not necessarily reflective of what was going on in my mind at the time. There was still a lot of internal dialogue. There was still a lot of chatter, and not that we're trying to stop that, but I would say that I was involved in it. I wasn't necessarily sort of watching it and observing it without any bias. So there's this idea that maybe we need to behave in a particular way in order to be mindful. Even in the the example of sort of giving a talk that we have to appear very confident, completely sort of free...