Hi, Sam here. Welcome to Radio Headspace and Happy Wednesday. So I've been incorporating

a lot of loving kindness into my guided meditations lately, and I usually ask folks to imagine

a loved one feeling safe, joyful, and at ease. By wishing ease for our loved ones, we too feel

at ease, just imagining them relaxed. So today I want to talk about savoring moments of ease,

not only in ourselves, but also the ease felt by others in our lives. In previous episodes,

I've talked about the concept of sympathetic joy, which is the practice of feeling joy for others

good fortune and happiness. But we don't have to stop there. In addition to joy, we can have a sense

of sympathetic ease, feeling relieved and at ease when we see those we care about most, relaxing.

Often when our loved ones are not at ease, we feel unsettled too. You may have a loved one who has a

hard time relaxing, maybe they're slammed with work or always running around multitasking,

and that energy of always being on the move can be contagious. But something we can do when the

people in our lives are going at full speed is pay attention to when they're at ease. And even

imagining what would bring them ease can bring us ease as well. When I think of someone that I wish

more ease and relaxation for, I think of my mom. She's currently getting her nurse practitioner

license and working full time and I almost never see her resting. But we recently had an experience of

ease as a family that I will never forget. It was an experience that changed her life, giving her a

glimpse of how relaxed and at ease she can feel. This moment took place last summer when my husband

took my mom and sisters to his favorite lake in his home country of Sweden. It was a spot that he

visited often as a child and we picked wild blueberries and bathed in the beauty of the forest

during the peak of Swedish summer. When we came to this lake there was hardly anyone there,

it was so serene and it was clear, clean and freezing cold. But my mom and sisters were undeterred and

began to swim with their inflatable floaty to the center of the lake. Seeing them laughing and

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