This Milestone Podcast Inspired Me to Celebrate Gratitude

(gentle music) Headspace Studio. (relaxing music) Hi, it's Andy here, and welcome to Radio Headspace, and to Friday morning, and not just any old Friday morning. This is our 100th episode. So thank you so much if you've been listening to Radio Headspace all this time or if you've been spreading the word. I hope it has been in some way useful in your life. On the note of appreciation and gratefulness, I think there is sometimes a tendency to get so caught up in what we are doing in life that we don't always have the opportunity to stop, to say thank you to the people we care about, maybe sometimes the people we don't even know. And I was recounting a story a few days back. It was for a show we were making on something. And I was asked to think back to a time where life had stopped to such an extent that I was truly able to feel that sense of appreciation. And I was talking about a time, it won't surprise you, in the monastery where I guess the conditions there are such that you don't only slow down physically, but that the mind also slows down. And so you get to a point where there is room for these qualities in the mind. And personally I feel they are ever-present qualities. They're not something that we go and find and discover. It's just in the absence of noise, in the absence of the thinking mind, we experience more directly those qualities. And one day, for whatever reason, as I sat there, the mind went quiet and I experienced a level of appreciation that I had never experienced in my life. There was nothing mystical about it. It was appreciation. It was in some ways one of the most fundamental, sort of human aspects of the mind, and yet I found myself incredibly moved by tears sort of rolling down my cheeks. And in my mind, experiencing just fleeting moments, flashes of things that had happened in my life, the good things that had happened, places I'd been, people who'd said nice things, people who'd been supportive. It was as though they were all there. It was all stored up in this bank. And as they flashed by, it just encouraged that sense of feeling, almost sort of connected in some way all those different thoughts and feelings. In a monastery it's tricky, 'cause on the one hand you wanna be able to say thank you to the people who've done things for you in your life, who've said things for you in your life. And yet, in a monastery you can't, you know, you can't sit there writing letters all day long. In fact, they say if you are gonna write home from retreat, everything that you write should fit on the back of a postage stamp, which doesn't leave a lot of room. And it's true in every part of life, right?...