Hi everyone, it's Sam here. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Tuesday. Recently I was pretty

sick and I don't know about you but when I get sick my mind tends to catastrophize.

I start to fixate on all the new and unpleasant things that my body is going through and then

I start assuming that I'll be sick for weeks on end.

Sickness is such a different state than we're used to and being sick affects our family,

our work and our social life so it makes sense that it can send us into a frenzy. It's

easy to start blaming ourselves for not taking good enough care of our health or thinking

about something else we could have done to prevent the illness.

Our global experience with COVID has introduced a whole new level of existential anxiety.

Before the vaccine we didn't know if the virus would leave us with the sniffles or send

us to the hospital. And this deep uncertainty made us relate to illness in a whole new way,

making us consider our own impermanence and the impermanence of loved ones all at once.

In Buddhism there's a set of statements called the remembrances and they're meant to ground

us in some harsh truths and remind us that there are some pretty uncomfortable experiences

that are natural aspects of any human life.

In a nutshell they say that growing old, getting sick and dying are inevitable and all that

is dear to us will change in some way. A blifting huh?

No, but it's not meant to depress the heck out of us. Instead these truths remind us

not to add to our suffering by resisting life experiences when they happen or get caught

up and how we think things should be. You may assume that contemplating your own inevitable

death could be nothing but unpleasant to say the least. But contemplating death can actually

help us remember what's most precious to us. It may empower us to be vulnerable and discover

...