Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about eliminating barriers to meditation. So a common thing I hear from people is that I can't meditate. And it's not that I can't meditate because I have to take care of my child or I have too much to do, it's I can't meditate because I'm feeling all these different things. I have too many thoughts to meditate.

I feel too bored when I meditate. I feel too much stress to meditate. And it's a really interesting hindrance in the context of meditation, because essentially what it's saying is that there's, there's a certain state that is arising that would be getting in the way of me being able to do the practice, when the practice at its core is making space for whatever state is actually there. And so to say, I can't meditate because my mind is too active, I'm too bored, I'm too stressed is really to not understand what the practice is intending to do. And it's a very common thing that can get in the way for even advanced meditators, this idea of like chasing certain states or that I need to be in a certain state to get the most out of my meditation.

And I found myself caught in that loop for years and a very big distinction and shift in my meditation practice was when I would feel that arising, that feeling of like, ah, I'm too bored to meditate right now, or I don't have the energy to meditate and I would say, great, that's what the meditation is going to be. It's going to be me meeting sleepiness. It's going to be me meeting boredom. It's going to be me meeting stress. So instead of that, being an obstacle, it became the very thing that, that the practice was going to be all about.

And the cool thing about doing that is that we reduce a lot of the that, a lot of the tension that we often feel when we create an emotion as an obstacle to an experience, or we create boredom as an obstacle. It's like, oh, in order to meditate, I'm going to have to like, not be bored anymore and push that aside. And it just, it's just extra tension in the system. But when we say to the system, it's like, no, you could just keep experiencing what you're experiencing right now. You don't have to do anything different.

We're just going to meet it. Kind of like a soft hand on someone's back or someone putting a soft hand on your back. Just like, oh yeah, I'm just here to hold whatever's here right now. That's meditation. That's bringing presence and awareness to what is arising in this moment, learning to meet it without resistance, without grasping.

And moving fluidly with the constantly changing experiences of your life. You're never going to get to a place where there's a permanent experience. So what we are training is learning how to bend with this moment, moving with the impermanence of life and meeting and relaxing into what is here right now. Of course, you know, there are some more intense experiences like trauma where, you know, if we're in a traumatic experience, we don't want to be meditating in that moment. We may want to be inviting ourselves to relax, but this is, there, I just want to acknowledge that there are some times where maybe sitting on the cushion isn't the best thing.

But when it comes to these normal experiences that we have on a day-to-day basis, different emotions we might experience different thoughts, these don't have to be barriers. These can be gateways. So thank you for your practice. See if you can take this into today's meditation. And let's settle in for today's meditation.