Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to invite you to take a moment to contemplate the miracle of life all around us. And as we go about, you know, our daily life, we spend a lot of time busy and distracted with all of our concerns. We're often so focused on our problems and our plans and our life story that we really rarely pause to ponder the bigger picture and the fact that we are part of a living, unfolding, mysterious universe. But when we do take a moment to become aware of the beauty and the boundlessness of the universe, we're often left with a feeling of awe and wonder.

It humbles us and yet it also reminds us that we are a part of something so much larger than ourselves. Seeing our own life as part of this much bigger picture can be a wonderful thing to contemplate because it helps us see our worries, our fears, and our desires from a much larger perspective. So often we wake up in the morning and we just kind of go through the motions. But today I invite you to pause here with me for a moment and remember that right now, the entire cosmos is unfolding in ways almost too incredible to believe. On the micro scale, subatomic particles that provide almost all the massive ordinary matter are flickering into and out of existence at lightning speed.

Now it's a mystery where they go when they go and how they come back. But they are what we are made of, what everything's made of. And you're sitting here right now, held steady by the force of gravity on a planet that is hurtling around the sun at something like 65,000 miles per hour. Our sun that sustains all life on this planet is just one of hundreds of trillions of stars that exist in billions of galaxies. Research now suggests that we may also be only in one of potentially millions of universes, that were part of a multiverse, a huge interconnected web of life unfolding moment by moment.

Think of all the miraculous ways that life is unfolding right now. Your heart is beating, your lungs are breathing and all the animals on this earth are sharing that together. We're all breathing together. Food is growing in the fields. Rain is evaporating and then flowing back down in cycle after cycle while the blood is rushing through our veins, nourishing our body.

Planets are spinning. Stars are being born while others are exploding. Time is moving. The universe is expanding. And perhaps the greatest mystery of all, we're conscious.

We're able to experience what it is to be alive in the midst of all of this. The miraculousness of all of this triggers, such a sense of wonder that it's almost too deep and profound to put into words. So perhaps every now and then today, you could pause again, take a deep breath and pan out to remember the miracle and the mystery of existence all around you, and then just let the appropriate awe set into your bones. Wishing you a wonderful day of practice with this. And as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us.

And let's settle in now for today's meditation.