Hey everyone, my name is Rosie and I'm one of the new hosts of Radio Headspace.

I'm an author and a yoga meditation teacher and my new episodes are debuting February of next year.

I can't wait to share them with you.

In the meantime, I'd like to let you know about a new show from Headspace Studios called Dear Headspace.

It's a call and advice show where Headspace teachers answer questions each week about anything and everything.

We talk about family, relationships, mindfulness and so much more.

You can find Dear Headspace on the Headspace app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.

Hi, my name is Andy and welcome to Radio Headspace.

It's a Monday morning. Let's talk about suffering. What else did you want to talk about on a Monday morning?

Don't worry, it's not suffering in the sense of like bringing you down. Hopefully this is something that will bring you a greater sense of inspiration for the week ahead.

I was chatting with a friend the other day and we were talking about different monastic experiences, different places that I'd stayed over the years.

I was talking about one particular monastery where we were given the option of one of three things to focus on. You don't have to live in a monastery to focus on one of these three things.

I think they apply anywhere in our life. The first one is impermanent. So focusing your attention moment to moment throughout the day on change.

So just noticing internally, externally, how things are constantly changing. If we do that over time, we start to see that everything is very kind of fluid.

There's nothing really that we can hold on to even if we want to hold on to it.

And there's no point in trying to repress things or suppress things because everything is moving, everything is fluid. If we allow that to come and go, then naturally we begin to have a different perspective on our life.

So that idea of change in impermanence, that's sort of one doorway, one gateway that we were offered for practice.

Another was a sense of non-self, so not being too attached to this idea that we are fundamentally separate from everything and every one around us.

Those ideas, a primarily sort of conceptual, they exist as ideas in our thinking mind. And the ones we drop those, well then we start to sort of feel a greater sense of connection which suggests that we're not so separate from one another.

So that was another gateway.

And then the third gateway is suffering and you may sort of think that suffering doesn't sound like a very appealing one to focus on and certainly back in the day, my vote went to change. But over time, as I've spent more time sitting in meditation, more time just living life really,

we start to see the value of getting comfortable with suffering and the benefit of understanding it. We may think that suffering is sort of the opposite to happiness, but I actually think that it's a way of experiencing more happiness if we frame it in the right way and if we work with it in the right way.

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