Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about how life is our true mindfulness practice. So although we often refer to mindfulness as a practice, it really is much more accurate to describe it as a way of living our lives with more awareness, and with more awareness comes less reactivity and less suffering and more wisdom, kindness and calm. With awareness comes the ability to live our lives more intentionally. And with awareness comes a sense of wholeness, connectedness, and happiness that starts to grow inside of you and can be carried with you through the ups and downs of life.

Now in our modern world, in our school systems, in our workplaces and in our culture in general, there's really not much emphasis on the importance of awareness, the importance of mindfulness. In our schools and our culture in general, the emphasis is much more on doing than being. And far too often, we get lost in doing to the point of being stressed, overwhelmed, and maybe even depressed or anxious. When our doing is divorced from the domain of being, we often find ourselves being kind of pushed through our lives by the momentum of the modern world, without stopping for long enough to pause and take stock. Without awareness, we become more reactive, more lost in autopilot mode, more disconnected from ourselves and the life all around us.

We become more disconnected from our moments. And in that scenario, it's really easy to lose sight of the big picture of what really matters in our lives. Without awareness, we can so easily fall into old conditioned patterns of belief and behavior that really may not serve us, may not be actually making us happy or healthy, and may even lead us, as a species, down a path that is very unwise indeed. Maybe even threatening our own existence on this planet. So mindful living is this waking up and reclaiming of our awareness so that we can live our lives more deliberately, more joyfully, more harmoniously and more passionately.

So we can become a locus of wisdom and sanity and kindness in the world. If we think that the practice ends when we get up from meditation, then we're really sort of missing the most important part of the practice. The practice is our lives. Our life is the practice. so in a moment to pause and every now and then, and stop ourselves from speaking harsh words, that's the practice.

Taking a mindful breath to soothe ourselves when we're feeling stressed, that's the practice. Giving ourselves compassion when we're hurting, that's the practice. Being non-reactive, that's the practice. Acting with generosity, kindness and wisdom is the practice. So mindfulness, isn't something that we only do during meditation.

We can access it in any moment of our lives. It's always as close as just one mindful breath. So see if you can remember to take a few of those today. And let's all settle in now for today's meditation together, but let's also make a shared intention that when we get up from the cushion or the couch that we keep carrying this awareness with us into the rest of our day. So as always thank you for your practice and your presence here with us, and let's settle in.