Hi, welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. You know, people often use this particular phrase, come to your senses, if someone's being reactive or maybe they're caught up in their thoughts or emotions. There's a lot of wisdom in this old saying, because by paying attention to our sense perceptions, we can reclaim our attention from being caught up in our minds and reconnect to the clarity, calm and wisdom of mindful awareness. It's truly one of the most simple and accessible mindfulness practices. In fact, the majority of meditation practices involve some kind of awareness of our senses.

Maybe it's the feeling of our breath or noticing sounds or sensations. So, of course, we can use this awareness of our senses, not just in meditation but in daily life too. So for instance, right now, can you notice the sensations at the contact points between your body and the surface that you're sitting or lying on? If you want to, you can close your eyes, if you find that helpful. But really tuning your attention in right now to the varying sensations at those contact points. Sothey might be tingling, pulsing, pressure, textures, temperatures.

What can you feel? And just opening your awareness now to the sounds of this particular moment. Seeing what's here to be heard. And if it's possible, just letting go of any mental commentary about the sounds and instead, just, just hearing what's here to be heard, just taking in the song of this moment. And feeling your breath flowing in and out of the body. The gentle expansion and contraction of the chest.

The rising and falling of the belly. And just taking a moment to notice how easily this awareness of your senses can ground you in the present moment, how it can bring you home to the here and now. So in today's meditation, we're going to be doing a longer practice of coming home to our senses in this way. But in our daily lives, there are also many ways we can use this awareness of our senses to help us become present. So the next time you're stuck in traffic, instead of worrying or ruminating or texting or cursing the traffic, you could simply feel your hands on the steering wheel or feel the breath in your body.

Or perhaps, if you find yourself in a, a difficult situation where you could become reactive, like an argument with someone, you could take a pause for just a moment and feel your feet on the ground, the right foot, the left foot, and let that kind of ground yourself in mindfulness before you speak. Or, you might simply like to just take in the colors and the sights and the sounds all around you in your lunch break today. So today, just see if you can remember to use this awareness of your senses to pull you out of mind wandering and anchor you back in the peace of the present moment.