Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about fear and the flower of growth. So when it comes to our own personal evolution and growth, it's important to step outside of our comfort zones and routines. So, what does that mean exactly to step outside of our comfort zone? Well, it means stepping out of certainty and routine and into the unknown. It means trying something new, taking a chance without knowing the outcome and being open to new discoveries.

As human beings, this can be a challenge sometimes because we tend to feel a bit of a gravitational pull towards the familiar and the routine. This is actually part of how the human mind evolved. You know, over the last 200,000 years of human evolution, most of that time, human beings lived as hunter-gatherers, and so playing it safe and staying in familiar places with familiar people and in familiar routines helped us have a better chance of survival. These days, we don't have to worry about this kind of thing, but the human mind still clings to the familiar out of fear of the unknown. While there's nothing wrong with, you know, being inside your comfort zone sometimes, we do need to stretch outside it to experience life fully.

So if you imagine like a small circle and then around it a larger circle. The inside part is called our comfort zone. And just in this zone outside, it is the growth zone. This is where we learn evolve and grow. And the more time you spend in this growth sewn, the more the boundaries of possibility for you stretch and things that were once scary or seemed impossible can become easy or really normal.

Now outside of the growth zone is the overwhelm zone. This is where you're pushed to your limits and it's just kind of too much for you. So in that space, we're not learning and growing anymore. What we need to do at that point is usually come back to our comfort zone for a little while. Take rest and recovery.

And then when we're ready, we can come out again into that zone of growth and learning. So what you end up with on the journey of personal evolution is this pattern, you know, where you have this inside circle and this pattern where you float into and out from the comfort zone and out to the edges of your growth. So, and that's why they call it the flower of growth. So that's really, really normal. We hit our limit sometimes, we come back to comfort, but most of the time we want to be in that growth zone.

So today and the week ahead, try to notice whether you might need to stretch outside your comfort zone or in some way, maybe come back to rest within it. And if fear is holding you back, seeing if you can take that brave step, past the boundaries of your former self, into new landscapes of possibility and power. Thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And inviting you now to just begin to settle in for today's meditation.