Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I'm going to share three steps to change patterns. I talk a lot about patterns of conditioning. These scripts that we can get caught up in, the same actions that we take, the thought patterns that trigger emotions that trigger behaviors. And the question then becomes, how do we work with those patterns? There are a lot of different strategies, but from a mindfulness perspective, there's something really powerful to just settling into the momentum of that pattern as it's arising so that it doesn't complete itself.

A big part of changing patterns is not letting them continue to reinforce themselves. So here are three steps you can use in those moments where you feel the energy, the momentum of a pattern moving through you, pushing you to react in a certain way, to respond in a certain way and what you can do to work with that. The first step is just to simply meet it. This might seem obvious, but there's something to bring presence to the experience that can already stop the pattern in its track. It's no longer operating subconsciously in the background of our awareness.

We're seeing it more clearly. So we just meet it. What does that look like? It couldn't look like feeling it, noticing the thoughts moving through your mind and just a general sense of that energetic momentum moving through your body that's saying, I need to do this. So we meet it. The next step.

Another simple one. Just breathe. Take a deep breath. The reason I use that so often and the reason I say it for so many different things is because it works. It settles the nervous system.

It, it helps also disperse some of that localized energy. And when I say localized energy, I mean like, think about if you wanted a cookie or something, you would feel that energy in your hands, or maybe in your mouth, like you really want that thing. When we take a deep breath, it allows that to spread out throughout the body so that it's, now we're a little less reactive. So we meet it. We take a breath.

And then the last step is to soften. Again, this one might feel obvious as well, but also really important. When we're caught in a pattern, it's often a form of tension. We're gripping around something. There's, there's something moving through us that is saying you need to do this.

And do you feel the tension that comes with that mentality of, I need to do this? So even after we've met it, we breathe, there may still be some form of tension showing up in the body, the shoulders, the jaw, the hands, and for that, we just invite all of that to soften. And what that will do it will also make us comfortable in that space of being with the pattern. We'll no longer feel some of the intensity, the emotional charge that the pattern is bringing up and it allows us to move through us in a more spacious way. So three steps: meet it, breathe, and soften. Try this out when you find yourself caught up in some of these patterns and at the very least this should help stop them in their tracks and not allow them to reinforce themselves in a way that wants to then create itself again in the future.

Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.