Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, we're going to talk about a way to check in with yourself during the day. On a normal day of our lives it's not uncommon to move from one thing to another without really being there fully. A lot of the time we're in autopilot mode, which is to say our attention is caught up in our wandering thoughts so we're not fully present in the moment. So, for instance, while dressing in the morning, you know, we're often lost in thinking about our to-do list for the day.

While we're kissing our spouse goodbye, we're already mentally playing through a meeting that's going to happen at work later. Eating lunch, we're mulling over a problem in our lives. Driving home that day, we're thinking about that next day already. So we often spend a lot of our days like this, only half here. And so we're losing precious moments that are not being fully lived.

So through mindfulness, we're becoming more present for our lives. And we do this by reclaiming our attention from constantly being lost in a fog of thinking and we're waking up more fully to the present moment. So we train ourselves to wake up out of autopilot mode over and over and over again. Now regular meditation is incredibly supportive in us being able to do this during the day, but just as importantly is how we continue to bring this practice into our day-to-day living. When we're dressing and driving and working and relating with others and ourselves.

So one helpful practice that I use a lot is just to simply regularly check in with myself and ask, am I fully present right now? And once you check in with yourself, if you don't feel like you fully arrived in the present moment, you can just take a pause for a moment and tune into your sense perceptions. You know, feel your feet on the ground, listen to the sounds around you, look around you at the colors and the shapes and the objects. Sometimes it can help to take a deep breath and just see if you can connect more fully to the here and now, and then proceed from that moment with awareness. And of course, it's often the activities that we do all the time routinely, where we phase out the most. You know, showering, eating, dressing.

So knowing this, see if you can deliberately check in with yourself during those times. And it can even be helpful sometimes to create little notes for yourself. I have one beside my toothbrush often, because that seems to be where I zone out the most. So this is a simple invitation for today. Just as you go about your routines, as you move through the day, as often as you can just remembering to ask yourself, am I fully present right now? This is how we integrate more mindfulness into daily life.

And as Sharon Salzberg once said, "Mindfulness, isn't difficult. We just need to remember to do it." So wishing you a wonderful day of practice with this. And as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And let's begin to settle in for today's meditation.