Transcript

By training the mind is often quite different to how people imagine it to be. Maybe they have an idea. It's about stopping thoughts, or eliminating feelings. But the reality is a bit different. An easy way to think of it is to imagine yourself sitting on the side of a busy road, the passing cars representing the thoughts and the feelings, all you have to do is to sit there and watch the cars. Sounds easy, right? But what usually happens is that we feel a bit unsettled by the movement of the traffic. So we run out into the road and try and stop the cars, or maybe even chase after a few forgetting that the idea was to just sit here.

And of course, all of this running around only adds to the feeling of restlessness in the mind. So training the mind is about changing our relationship with the passing thoughts and feelings, learning how to view them with a little more perspective. And when we do this, we naturally find a place of calm, where we sometimes forget the idea of the exercise and become distracted.