The Peace of Presence

Hey there. Welcome back to Day Six of our Seven Day Sleep Challenge. Congratulations for making it this far. In today's session, we're going to explore how to help calm and settle the mind. We've been doing this through a variety of different practices from deep breathing, to gratitude, to positive visualization, and to relaxing the body.

But one simple way we can ground our mind is to give it something to focus on and this we can think of as The bicep curl for the brain. Every time the mind wanders into something else, we practice bringing it back. In the same way that the weight of a dumbbell pulls the arm down, we practice pulling it back up and we then strengthen that muscle in the same way we're strengthening our muscle of presence through this particular meditation practice. And the research does show that this practice of meditation, of refocusing our attention, does over time dampen the activity in the amygdala, which is responsible for our fight or flight reactivity, AKA our stress response. However, we can also look at it more practically in the moment.

One definition we have for stress is when our perceived demands are greater than our perceived resources to meet those demands. The key word there though is what? Perceived. Because often what we perceive to be demanding is very different than what is actually demanding. So often our perceived demands are everything that is to come, all the things we have to do the rest of the day and tomorrow, things that haven't gotten done yet. And we bring all of that into this moment.

And of course we feel overwhelmed. Have you had that experience before going to bed? The mind is already thinking about everything it needs to do tomorrow. All the emails you need to take care of ,all the people you need to take care of, the calls you need to make, the things that need to get done. Of course, you're feeling stressed and of course you're not able to sleep. The power of simple mindfulness practice of returning back to this moment over and over is that we reduce our demands to quite simply, what is here now.

What is here now. And often what we see, is this moment is a lot less stressful than the mind is making it out to be. This is what we'll explore in today's meditation. So let's settle in.