Applying Love Meditation, with Andy Puddicombe

(calm music) Headspace Studio. Hi, it's Andy here, and welcome to Radio Headspace and it's Tuesday morning. Throughout these podcasts, every now and again, we touched upon meditation itself, even the techniques to some degree. And I wanna talk about one particular technique today. It's not really about the technique, it's more about the quality. The reason for doing the technique, the intention behind it. You might have heard of it, it's called loving kindness. And think it's a really interesting way to think about how we show up in the world. In one of the earliest monasteries that I trained in, many of the monks and nuns will not only spend time in the monastery, and the monastery by the way, is, and the retreat center is actually kind of in the jungle. So you know, it's surrounded by wild forest, wild animals, and everything else. So the training takes place not only there, but actually in the forest itself. And monks and nuns will go away into the forest for extended periods of time and on sort of elevated platforms. Sometimes in the tree, not always, sometimes kind of, it'll be on the floor, but often to keep away from snakes and other wild animals. Some of 'em are really intense, by the way, really poisonous. They would build these platforms in the trees. It's interesting, if you look at the training before they go into those periods of retreat and meditation, they actually spend a lot of time practicing loving kindness. And you might kind of think, you know, sort of what's the association. So imagine you walk into a room one day and there's someone there who you know, you know really well, and without them saying anything, you kind of have a feel, right, for what's going on in their mind, in their body, and in their life on that day, at that moment. We just have a feel there's something that we give out when we're happy, when we're feeling kind and generous, when we're feeling angry, when we're feeling sad, there is just a feeling beyond speech, beyond even action. And we sense it, we know it, and it's interesting. Often it's sort of not ignored, but maybe underrated or undervalued. We accept the fact that, you know, we're quite comfortable talking about, oh yeah, dogs know. Like dogs are brilliant at that. They always know when I'm happy, when I'm sad. But for some reason, as humans, we bring down the value of that maybe, but these monks and nuns, they'll actually train for long periods of time in loving kindness, knowing that when they go into the forest, if there's any sort of aggression or anger or defensiveness in their body, they are that much more likely to get into trouble with the local wildlife. If they can sit there, I wouldn't say minding their own business, but sort of at peace with their environment within nature, then it seems to...