Change Is Possible

(air fizzing) (air clicking) (bells dinging) Headspace Studios. (calm music) Hi, it's Andy here, and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Wednesday morning. So I wonder if there's a part of you that you would like to change. For most of us, I think, there are aspects of ourselves that we might wish were a little different, and sometimes there might be a feeling as though it's impossible to change, and the older we get we might assume that, well, the longer we've been alive the more solid those qualities become and therefore the less likely it is to change. But today I'd like to kind of reframe that a little differently and maybe offer a glimmer of hope that we can change at any age. And look, I say this as not only someone who's getting on in years, but, you know, we've had people along at Headspace in their 70s, 80s, and 90s learning meditation and talking about how even at that age it's really transformed their thinking, the way they feel about themselves and about particular aspects of themselves. And I'm always fascinated by this idea of impermanence and change and how everything is in constant flux all of the time. If we think about the physical body, for example, okay, so more than, I don't know exactly how many, but I know there's more than 30 trillion cells in the body and that those cells are refreshed, replaced in full every six months, something like that. We're on a sort of a cycle. So even though we look at our physical body and we might assume that it is solid, that it's fixed, that it kind of is what it is, well, in truth, the entire physical body is being refreshed and replenished over that period of time. So then we might think, "Yeah, sure, "but what about our thoughts and our mind? "That's always the same." And well, if meditation teaches us anything, if mindfulness teaches us anything, it's that the mind is never the same. Sure, we might have the same similar sort of themed thoughts that come back time and time again, but it's never the same thought. It might sound identical in the mind, it may look identical in the mind, but it's always within a different environment because the mind is constantly changing. So if we're able to witness that clearly in our mind and see that thoughts are always changing, feelings are always changing, that our body is always changing, and that our place in the world is always changing, then all of a sudden things don't feel so fixed. They don't feel so static. There's a feeling, even if it's just a little bit, of freedom, of movement offering us the possibility and the potential for change. So as you go into your day today, as you go into the rest of the week, just maintaining that idea that there is perhaps a lot more freedom in our mind, in...