Hi, and welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session we're going to talk about healing and integration. In any modern book on healing, especially trauma, such as the Body Keeps the Score, Waking the Tiger, Healing Developmental Trauma or Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. These are some of the top trauma books. You'll repeatedly see a theme that emphasizes the importance of compassionate presence for processing and integrating unresolved psychological and emotional pain, whether it's a deep trauma or a smaller one.

This compassionate presence can come from another person holding space for you like a therapist, especially in the initial stages of your healing. But this external person should support you to eventually cultivate this compassionate presence within yourself. Similar to what we're trying to do here at Mindfulness.com, so that you, you can carry that with you during difficult moments and show up almost as your own therapist, which isn't to diminish or dismiss the role of an external therapist, which can be a great life along companion. And even if you're thinking, you know, I, I haven't experienced trauma or anything that difficult. Well, we've all experienced some trauma to varying degrees, especially if we define trauma as any experience that causes us to feel less whole, less safe to be ourselves and less able to experience the fullness of life.

And so this compassionate presence is a powerful way to hold space for yourself, so that difficult experiences don't get stuck in your mind and body, and don't get internalized or suppressed, just creating more tension and stress moving forward. It's really important for these emotions to be felt as they're happening so they can be processed, integrated and released rather than just stored in our backpack of life, which often gets heavier and heavier. So if you're going through something difficult, revisiting old patterns and wounds, or experiencing intense emotions that seem to arise out of nowhere, practice meeting yourself with a compassionate presence. Well, we will practice doing this and our meditation today, but if you're doing this throughout the day and need some help feeling into how to get there, imagine holding space for a young child who just lost their puppy. You're, you're just there to be a steady, gentle presence for them.

Helping them feel and process their pain. Not trying to make it better because you can't. And this is the kind of presence you want to bring to yourself during difficult experiences. And if we were to put this all into a very simple equation, it might go like this, emotional pain plus compassionate presence equals healing and integration. Thank you for your practice and let's settle in for today's meditation.