This Experience Revealed the True Nature of Advice

(mouse clicking) (soft music) Headspace Studios. (gentle music) Hi, my name's Andy, and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Thursday morning. I don't if you're learning any new skills at the moment. I know lots of people have been learning lots of new things over the last six months, especially when lockdown was so prevalent everywhere. Lots of people were writing on social media about new things they were learning. I was chatting to a friend, a good friend the other day, whose son is learning to play the piano, and they said like before COVID happened, he would go along and he would learn to play the piano. So he'd have a lesson once a week and that was working well for him. He was learning and they thought sort of after COVID, like how were they going to catch up? 'Cause he hadn't any lessons for a long time and they were thinking of sort of going to multiple lessons a week. And it reminded me of a time in the monastery, several different monasteries. If you're wondering where I'm going with this and how we've just jumped from a piano lesson to the monastery, this is about the nature of advice, how much is useful and how much is actually harmful. And is there somewhere between the two where we can benefit from the advice of somebody who has walked that path before, who's learnt that skill before, and yet at the same time, find sort of a balance if you like, where we're actually curious and interested enough ourselves in the process that we are learning the skill alongside that advice? (gentle music) 'Cause when I think back, I can think of one monastery where I would see the teacher every single day. 10 minutes scheduled every single afternoon. And there was benefit to that. It was kind of nice to touch base. At the same time, there was maybe not enough had happened in that period of time to really discuss a lot. And it also set up an expectation that there should be something that had happened within that period of time. I felt like I couldn't keep pace with the expectation of the skill. And then if I think of another monastery, it was the other extreme. We would sometimes go months and months. We might even go six months in retreat and not have any contact with our teacher at all. The idea being, well, I'll give you the instructions and then it's just up to you. Go and get on with the practice. And sure, questions are gonna arise. That's okay. Let the questions arise. Don't get too caught up in them, don't think too much about them. Just get on with the practice. If you really have a question that you just can't get past, write it down. We'll talk about it in six months time. I found that really, really helpful. But what it taught me was that actually a...