Why Don’t You Just Try It?

(object shifts) (mouse clicks) (bright music) Headspace Studio. (ethereal music) Hi, my name's Andy, and welcome to "Radio Headspace." So it's Monday morning. I hope you enjoyed the weekend. I know in lots of places it's a long weekend. This weekend, wherever you are, I hope you're safe and that you are well. Now, chatting to friends over the last few weeks, the last few months, a number have said to me how they're using this time to reconsider their lives. You know, what's working for them, what's not working for them professionally, personally. Are there things that they wanna stop doing? Are there things they wanna start doing? In those conversations brought up how they feel perhaps a little nervous about trying something different, about trying something new. And I think so often in life we don't necessarily follow through with the things that we would like to do because we're worried about the outcome, because we're worried about how it might be experienced by ourselves or perceived by others. And in fact, people often ask me, "When you went off to become a monk, what were you thinking?" That's probably the point right there. I don't think I was thinking. And, of course, there are times when it's really important that we do think ahead, but there are other times when we tend to overthink things. I'm always reminded of a particular teacher at circus school, and yep, you heard that right, circus school. So after the monastery, I did a degree in circus arts, and as part of that training we used to have to do a sort of a theater element and we'd have to get up on the stage. Basically, the entire class would be there, the teacher would be there, and as soon as he got sort of bored or he thought you'd been up there for too long, he'd just bang his drum. You'd get off the stage and the next person would get up there. And sometimes you could talk, sometimes you couldn't talk. But the point was to try something without any sort of, you know, without really sort of thinking about the outcome so much. Of course, when you first went up there it was terrifying. It was embarrassing. There was a lot sort of self-consciousness for everybody in the class. And when things went well and everybody laughed, it was the best feeling. It was amazing. Keep going until eventually sort of ran out of steam. And you might kind of replay that in your mind sort of later in the day. When things went badly, it was really painful. Almost sort of humiliating at times. And you might replay that again and again sort of later in the day. So sort of being attached to the good feeling and not really wanting to experience the bad feeling. The interesting thing was as the terms and the years sort of progressed, the outcome became a lot less important. It became more about...