That's basically it.

Hi everyone, it's Sam here.

Welcome to Radio Headspace and Tuesday.

So sometimes, mostly when I'm lying in bed and can't fall asleep, I try to come up with

questions to ask my voice assistant.

One evening when my husband and I had been feeling especially discouraged by the world's

news, we asked this device for reassurance.

So I was expecting some uplifting statistics.

You know, maybe an almost extinct bird had made a resurgence, or poverty trends were

turning around as more people were finding jobs in the last fiscal quarter, something like

that.

As I awaited some positive news, my voice assistant responded, the trail of tears.

My husband and I looked at each other, jaws dropped, waiting for the horrific recounting

of this tragic historical event to end.

So yeah, not reassuring at all.

And this got me thinking about Buddhist approaches to reassurance and how Buddhist deal with fear.

So Zen Buddhists take an approach that's akin to exposure therapy.

In essence, they train their minds to acknowledge and accept the harshest truths of reality, using

it as fuel to grasp the preciousness of each moment, knowing that life is dreadfully

short and that we should live it to the fullest.

I realized that with the barrage of negative news and uncertainty, sometimes, or quite

often for me, we could benefit from having some standard phrases of reassurance on hand

...