Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about dealing with restlessness and agitation. Now, it's not uncommon to feel a little bit restless during meditation. We've probably all experienced this from time to time. And although this feeling might be a little bit of an unwanted visitor, it can actually also be a very powerful teacher if we can learn to become curious about it and work with it rather than against.

So in daily life, we are actually probably experiencing this kind of restlessness. It's more than we realize. But when we do feel it, our natural tendency is to usually immediately distract ourselves from the feeling, drown it out or escape it. Perhaps we go and eat something, drink something, start scrolling on our phones. Maybe we push through it or become reactive and start getting angry, frustrated, or tense.

So this is the wonderful thing through meditation, we can learn a different way of being with this restlessness inside. We can learn to gently and compassionately face our feelings of agitation. So by bringing this mindful awareness to it, we can transform our relationship with this turbulent inner state. Sometimes the agitation might be like a background unease. And then other times it might be really intense or difficult to be with.

But in either case, we can learn to work with it and wage peace with it. So we really want to bring an attitude of befriending this feeling of restlessness, being curious, kind of having a playful curiosity about it. And we can do this by simply letting go of any struggle against the experience of agitation, making room for it to be there, just letting it be. Sometimes it can be wonderful to say to yourself, to mentally note something like, okay, restlessness is here. Or you could say something, like right now it's like this.

So we do this in the service of bringing in a curious and accepting awareness so that we can sit with our experience without pushing it away, and over time we develop our capacity to be less reactive, more calm and centered. We're also more able to live our lives intentionally because we're cultivating this ability to stay present and grounded with the agitation instead of it compelling us to distract, escape, or be overwhelmed. There's truly so much power in training ourselves to stay present in these moments where we usually run or shut down. This can be really transformational. So the next time you feel agitation, unease, restlessness, or boredom arising in your practice or in your life, instead of resisting it or being compelled to distraction, see if you can gently allow it to be there, be present with it and let the awareness surround that restlessness in a soothing and kindly awareness.

As always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And just inviting you to now settle in for today's meditation.