Hi and welcome to Radio Headspace. It's Eve back here with you for another week.

So I was listening to a podcast over the weekend about the cost of not listening. And in

this case it was in relation to climate change. And I was reminded of a question that I was

asked by a young headspace member a few months ago. So the question goes, I wanted to ask about

climate anxiety and what can we do to help with feeling stressed around climate change.

As a young person I see these changes and the devastation climate change causes which makes me

nervous, mad and scared about my future. Do you have any tips to help with these feelings and what

we can do about it? What struck me most about this question was how much I related to her concerns

and I know many others do as well. When we feel threatened or are safety and the safety of those

we love is potentially being threatened. It's very normal to feel a sense of fear. It's very normal

to experience stress and anxiety and it's understandable that we might project that worry into the future.

Now I'm not for a second suggesting that meditation alone can solve the climate crisis.

But if you think about what we are cultivating when we practice meditation and mindfulness,

qualities like kindness, deep listening, patience, generosity, you can see how these can be

used in a really skillful and productive way. You start to see that we are part of a shared human

experience and we start to understand that our actions have consequences. Meditation is both an

inward and an outward practice and what I mean by this is by taking time to look inwards to

identify our feelings and emotions. We can make space for them to be there but work with them in

a skillful way. And we start to see what is perhaps going to be supportive and what is perhaps not.

And this then extends outwards as well into our environment and we can make more informed

choices. We have a greater capacity to see what is going to be supportive to those people around

us and including the environment that we live in. It truly is interconnected in this way.

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