Truths of Meditation & Grief

(item swooshes) (mouse clicks) (spellbinding music) Headspace Studios. (soothing music) Hello and welcome back to Radio Headspace and to this brand new week. It's Eve here. I hope you had a lovely weekend. Recently, I have been thinking a lot about the fact that life can be full of beauty and joy but also pain and loss. And it then got me thinking about some of the essential philosophies that really underpin the traditional teachings of meditation and mindfulness. So this week I wanted to spend a bit of time going back in history and sharing what I have learned from studying these practices and how they have supported me, both in times of great joy, but also in my darkest moments. So today I'll be breaking down one of the core teachings or truths as it's described in the traditional texts, and that is, in life, we will experience suffering. The good news is there are some remedies to the suffering that we experience. (soothing music) So let's start with a little history. Meditation and mindfulness have been around for over 2,600 years. At Headspace, we like to say that's a lot of research and development. And originally these practices came from South Asia where a man named Siddhartha Gautama lived in the Himalayan foothills. His father was a chief and shielded his son from the outside world for many years. Siddhartha lived a life of ease and luxury, never having to deal with pain or loss or fear. When he was older, he got married and had a son, and for the first time ever in his life, he ventured outside of the palace walls. (people chattering) What he saw shocked him terribly. He witnessed a sick person, a dying person, and a corpse being taken to the burning grounds. Siddhartha was understandably perplexed by witnessing so much suffering, realizing that old age, sickness and death would come to those he loved, and he had no way to stop it. He was desperate to try and find an answer to the question, how do I end suffering? He decided to leave the palace at the age of 29 to try to answer this question. As a result of deep self-reflection and meditation, Siddhartha realized that suffering is a part of life. He awoke at this time as the Buddha, which literally means awakened one, but the Buddha's realization wasn't simply about aging, sickness, and death. It's that as human beings, a lot of our suffering comes from a sense of dissatisfaction, and this often occurs in the mind. The founder of MBSR, Jon Kabat-Zinn, translated this into what we call stress today. The good news is that we can overcome this sense of stress by letting go of our desires for always wishing things to be different than they are, because so often we miss what's right in front of us. When we can let go of rigid expectations, we can start to cultivate peace and happiness. Practices like meditation,...