Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about releasing patterns of conditioning. Now the interesting thing about mindfulness practice is that it tends to have a transformative quality to our patterns and habits without us even intending for it to do so. There's something about bringing more awareness to our experiences as they're already happening that tends to have a transformative quality. We start to learn more why we're doing what we're doing, all the twists and turns that we take on our life path.

And instead of going through that on automatic pilot, we see, Oh, when this thought arises, it triggers this emotion, which triggers this action. And in those ways we get much more granular in seeing the, the causal mechanisms for why we do what we do in the world. But also there's something to bring in more awareness to our experience that allows old patterns to actually complete themselves. And we can look at that through the lens of, let's say an emotion. So all emotions have as their nature to be like a sine wave.

They arise and then they pass away. And in fact, the research shows that most emotions only last about 90 seconds, which is kind of crazy to hear when you hear it for the first time, because it's like, well, all the emotions I have do not last only 90 seconds. They last for a long time. And the reason for that is because, typically when they arise, they peak, especially a difficult emotion. And then we get in the way of it with thoughts of, I shouldn't be having this experience, when's this going to pass, or I need to suppress this.

And that actually prevents the emotion from continuing its course and coming to a full completion where we come back to baseline. Instead it gets stuck in the background of our awareness and continues to be reinforced. So there are a lot of patterns of conditioning within us that are sort of lingering there from many years ago and just continue to work in the background, continuing to create habits, patterns, things that we repeatedly do in the world. However, when we bring more awareness, we're deepening our sense of presence. And it's allowing those experiences to actually be felt fully and then released.

We're no longer suppressing the completion of those experiences, which can be true for thoughts. It can be true for emotions and it can even be true for pains that arise in the body, that we might try to deny, push away or not allow ourselves to experience fully. There are endless experiences that I've had in my meditation practice, that when I bring full presence to them, it might intensify for a period of time, but then it actually transitions. So the key thing I want you to remember and take away from this daily mindfulness is that when something is in the background, it's being reinforced. But when it's in the foreground it's being released.

The good news is we're already doing this with our mindfulness practice, and we'll continue to deepen this with our meditation. Thank you for your practice and let's settle in for today's meditation.