Why We Meditate

(gentle music) Headspace Studio. (gentle music) Hi there, and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Monday. It's Eve here with you. So you might have been listening to the show for a while or this might be the first time you are tuning in. Either way, I hope today's topic is helpful and that is why we practice meditation. We practice because life is sometimes pretty difficult. We can't always control what happens but we do have the potential to transform how we relate to those things. We need awareness, a deeper level of clarity and insight to understand our minds, and we need compassion and kindness to connect with ourselves and others. So to help bring this point to life, I'm going to share an analogy of a storm. So when we feel overwhelmed, anxious, or scared, it can feel like we're in the middle of a storm. Our thoughts and emotions can hit us from all directions. And rain is pelting down so hard, it stings the eyes and there's leaves and debris everywhere. We're not always going to be able to stop the storm or control its path, but our practice, our meditation, helps us to move inside and out of the storm so that we can view it more clearly. We can see directly what is happening and the impact it is having. We're not pretending that the storm has stopped. We can still see the rain, but we're not being hammered by it. Many of our struggles arise from how we relate to the different states of mind we experience. So take anxiety as an example. First of all, anxiety is a very normal emotion to experience. It's this apprehension that something might go wrong, or won't go according to plan, and that the outcome could be really bad, it's not bad to want things to be okay. Our anxieties often come from a good place, but a lot of the time we can't see that. An anxious thought arises or a disconcerted feeling in the body might accompany it, maybe a tight throat, tense shoulders, a stomach that is doing somersaults, and that almost gives fuel to the thoughts, we can get stuck in this repetitive thought cycle. So returning to why we practice, meditation, practicing mindfulness, puts some space between our thoughts, emotions, feelings, and behaviors. Try and imagine this. When there is no space, our thoughts are stacked tightly on top of each other, each one giving fuel to the one below. And then our emotions and feelings are then layered tightly on top of that pile, and we're not able to see them clearly, and we may even want to push them down deeper. We then act on this tight, restricted pile of thoughts, feelings, and emotions, often in ways that are not supportive of ourself or others. Now, picture adding some space between the piles of thoughts, feelings, and emotions, you can see them a little more clearly, you can...