Healing Relationships Through Shared Experiences, with Andy Puddicombe

(graphic whooshing) (mouse clicking) (tranquil music) Headspace Studios. (tranquil electronic music) Hi, it's Andy here, and welcome to Radio Headspace. So you'll know if you've listened to Radio Headspace before, if you've listened to the Headspace app over the years, I tend to talk a lot about something called the shared human condition. And I think that can encompass so many different aspects of life. Of course, it encompasses the difficulties that we all go through in our life, both internally and externally, but it also talks to something that perhaps exists beyond or underneath, however you like to think about it. Not just our thinking mind, but even sort of the lives that we live. Perhaps it talks to something that sort of connects us all in some way. This is something that's always sort of fascinated me. I remember going into one of my first Buddhist monasteries that I lived in, and for the first, I can't remember how many months it was, we were only allowed into a certain part of the library. And in that library were just Buddhist books, as you would expect in a Buddhist monastery. The philosophy, the psychology, the practice, and everything else. And then after a number of months of being there, you were allowed into another part of the library. And in another part of the library, there were actually, it was a really broad offering of books. There were books there on, I dunno, Sufism, and sort of Christian mysticism, and all the different sort of great religions, and traditions, and pathways in the world. And even as someone who is not particularly sort of religious in nature, in terms of following a doctrine as such, I'm kind of fascinated by what connects all of those things. (tranquil ambient music) And actually, as I started reading the teachings of many of those great sort of masters and philosophers that are taught over the years, you start to see a real connection, and as I went on and had the good fortune to meet many people from different contemplative traditions, actually started to see that, and I know I've said this before as well, kind of the further, or the more we talk about the essence of humanity, or the essence of awareness, compassion, again, of love, however you like to think about it, almost the further away we move from what it is, and of course, when you look at lots of different traditions side by side, and they each have their own sort of flavor and language, it feels as though each one is so different. But at its heart, at its core, it's really the same thing. How could it be anything other than the same thing? That idea of the shared human condition, of course we have different language for it, of course we talk about it in a different way, how could we not? Apart from anything else, most of them will come from different cultural...