This episode is about meditation, this episode is about pain and this episode is about compassion. I am going to tie these three areas together. I’ve given 100’s of classes and courses in meditation - and one of the things I've noticed - which I'm sure you've noticed too, is that many people have a view about meditation. People often think it's like shutting yourself down and a lot of people struggle, unnecessarily, when they meditate because they try to clear their mind. And that phrase clear your mind is sort of thrown around, a lot - clear your mind, clear your mind, clear your mind - and of course, you're sitting there trying to clear the mind and the mind is screaming! And so people are struggling to clear their mind, to switch off their thoughts. I think people are struggling because the whole concept is not helpful - trying to sort of go into a blank state, is more like trying to become unconscious - it's like being in a coma.

I think meditation has nothing to do with clearing the mind - it has nothing to do with switching off! It's about exactly opposite, it’s switching on, it's about waking up. And so our thoughts, and the emotions and particularly, our pain are very powerful catalysts in the practice, if you can learn how to work with them, in a creative way. When we talk about meditation and about consciousness, especially talk about expanding our consciousness - which is obviously the theme here - what we're talking about is realizing that our mind is bigger than our thoughts.

Some of the metaphors used in the ancient texts on meditation, are metaphors, such as the sky or the ocean. So imagine you're flying in an aeroplane and the plane is coming down to land - of course, we know that the plane is going to come down, through the clouds and land. What if you didn't know that, maybe if you're a small child - you might think that the plane is going to crash into the clouds because they look very solid. So in the metaphor the sky is our mind - the clouds are our thoughts and emotions. And this is what happens to us...