Hi, and welcome to Day Two of our

seven day Meditation Challenge.

My name's Melli O'Brien and I'm so excited

to be joining with Cory Muscara and the

thousands of you who are coming together

as part of the Mindfulness.com community.

And a big part of Mindfulness.com always

has been feeling the power and the

connection that comes from being part

of a caring community like this one.

Well, so I hope you enjoyed

exploring with Cory yesterday,

the what if to what is practice?

It's one of my favorites.

Today I'm going to offer you some

insights about healing negative emotions

through mindfulness and self-compassion.

So when we're going to do and

stressful times in life, like most

of us are right now, some pretty

uncomfortable emotions tend to arise.

Now our usual response to these emotions

is that we want them to go away.

That's quite natural.

But so we often start to struggle

against the emotion by going

into our heads and thinking about

the problem over and over again.

So we ruminate about it.

We worry about it.

We try to fix it and figure it out.

We might even try suppressing the feelings

or ignoring them and just soldiering on.

But with that strategy, in

time, those emotions do tend

to come to the surface again.

So we tend to apply a lot of mental effort

in these ways, kind of trying to a force

the difficult emotions to go away quickly.

But when we're going through really

hard times, it's actually really

natural to feel these kinds of emotions.

And fighting them or pushing them

down doesn't make them move on faster.

When we experienced painful or

difficult emotions, it's best

actually not to go into your head and

ruminate and overthink the situation.

In fact, the research shows

that this habit of overthinking

actually tends to prolong difficult

feelings and make them bigger.

So that's not what we want.

Instead what we can do is use

self-compassion to kind of create a

comforting and healing inner environment

in which those emotions can come to

the surface where they can be felt and

acknowledged, where they can be met

with kindness, patience, compassion,

and understanding, and they're allowed

to unfold and heal in their own time.

So we really just create this container

and then we entrust the passage

of time to take care of the rest.

And it could be moments, it

could be days, it could be

years before the emotion passes.

So we really just genuinely

have to fully let go of our

agendas to change the emotion.

And instead of fighting with the emotion,

we switch the focus to caring for them.

And if you think about this new

attitude, it's such a kindness towards

ourselves because instead of fighting

with ourselves in the midst of a

difficult time, we're waging peace

with ourselves in the middle of it all.

So as you traverse these difficult

times we're in, just remembering it's

pretty natural that difficult emotions

are going to arise from time to time.

And when they do, seeing if you can

remember, instead of overthinking with

them or struggling with them, just make

your sole task creating this compassionate

container of awareness, allowing the

emotion to arise and unfold, and when

the time is right, letting it dissolve.

Today, I'm going to guide you through

a self-compassion meditation where you

can practice this skill and then take it

forward with you into the days to come.

So thank you for your practice

and your presence here with us.

And now let's settle in

for today's meditation.