Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. You know, we all have moments of pain and distress. When the demands of our lives stretch us to our limits or when we feel grief, heartbreak, or hopelessness. And when we struggle or fight against our own feelings in those times, it's a little bit like drowning in quicksand. We only add more suffering to an already difficult moment.

You know, it's important to remember, this is when we need kindness and gentleness towards ourselves the most. So here's a practice to guide you through your darker times with compassion, mindfulness, and gentleness. It was created by Dr. Kristin Neff and it's called the self-compassion break. So if you care to, I'm just just going to invite you to close your eyes.

And just to bring to mind a situation in your life that's challenging or painful, or causing you some kind of distress. And just tuning into your body and see if you can actually locate the physical sensations of where you feel that emotion in your body. And step one is to bring acceptance to what's happening, mindful acceptance. So by doing this, we let go of hardening against and struggling with what's happening. So step one is to say to yourself, either aloud or mentally, this is a moment of suffering.

Step two is about realizing our common humanity and kind of normalizing the experience of having difficult feelings, because of course we all do sometimes. You know, there's no need for us to feel so alone in our experience or guilty, ashamed, um, or ashamed of, of what's a normal part of being human. So in this step, you say to yourself, either out loud or mentally, you know, suffering is a part of life. I'm not alone in this. And step three is about offering yourself compassion.

You know, this is a difficult moment. So here we bring kindness to ourselves in the midst of our pain. So you might like to place a hand over your heart as a gesture of compassion, if that feels okay for you. And in this third step we say to ourselves mentally or out loud, you know, may I be kind to myself in this moment. So there's an optional, extra step as well, a step four.

And that's to ask yourself, what do I need right now? How do I, how could I express this kindness to myself? So for instance, is there an action step you could take to give yourself kindness? Like taking a warm bath, going for a walk in nature, um, calling a friend. So when you were darkest hour and in your moments of pain, see if you can remember to give yourself the gift of self-compassion. And by doing so you can find connection, softness, and soothing when you're hurting and you can bring kindness to yourself when you need it the most. And in today's meditation, we'll be infusing our practice with this self-compassionate awareness and then making an intention to take that with us into the rest of our day. I look forward to practicing with you.