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.

That's based here.

Hi, I'm Andy and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Friday morning.

Within the world of training the mind, I think there is a tendency sometimes to think that if we're training the mind, if we're looking after the mind, we are automatically training it to be positive all of the time.

Of course, if you are familiar with the foundations of mindfulness, it has nothing to do with that.

On the one hand, we are approaching the mind with a positive intention and we're encouraging the space for positive thoughts and we're recognizing how destructive it can be or overwhelming it can be when the mind wanders off when we get caught up in old difficult habitual patterns of mind.

But we're not really trying to always be positive.

One of you remember, there's a pretty good chance that you've watched friends at some stage in your life. I think it was Alec Baldwin, I could be wrong, but who played a character who was just relentlessly positive?

And to the extent that he just didn't quite ring true. Again, it's not that it's a bad thing to be positive, but there's something that doesn't necessarily feel authentic about it.

My room is a monk, I had a piece of paper on the wall and whenever I read or heard a particular thing that sort of stuck in my mind and that I wanted to remember, I'd write it down on this piece of paper and at the end when I left the monster, I took the paper with me and thought,

this is something like useful kind of guidance for life. And it was one of one of my teachers there who said, meet people where they are. Tell them what they want to hear, not what you think they should hear. And that wasn't meant in the sense of giving people permission to do or say or to think negative things that could potentially harm.

It was more the sense of, say, meeting people where they are. If someone's having a hard time, I don't know about you, but the last thing I want to hear if I'm having a really hard time is someone who's relentlessly cheerful, saying, no, come on, you don't want to think like that, kind of cheer up and actually what I really would like, if someone just put their arm around me and say, yeah, I get it. It's really hard.

And if we take that approach, then we have to recognize that that sort of relentless positivity doesn't allow us to meet people where they are when they're having a difficult time.

And it's really important that we're in touch with the folks around us and it's really important that we're in touch with our own feelings because there is no person on earth who always feels positive.

And if we're telling ourselves that story in our own mind, there's no way that we're really listening to the way that we feel.

The thoughts, the feelings in our body and our mind are constantly changing as human beings. Life is complicated and it requires many different approaches, many different responses.

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