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How to Meditate: Meditation 101 for Beginners

10 Science-Backed Benefits of Meditation

What is Meditation?

Mindful LivingSleep
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Cory Muscara

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The Problem Is Not Distractions

Personalized support for learning how to integrate mindfulness into your life. Delivered fresh everyday by our world renowned experts. Choose meditation duration:

Hi, welcome back to

your Daily Mindfulness.

In today's session, I want

to talk about distractions.

We live in a world with

a lot of distractions.

It's a big topic of conversation within

the mindfulness community, but the global

community, especially with netflix series

like the Social Network coming out,

highlighting all the different ways that

social media can pull at our attention

and it's vying for our attention.

And it often pins distractions as a bad

thing, or stimulation as a bad thing.

Then we can go into that whole

argument and the ethical argument of

how much stimulation were receiving.

But the problem in my mind

is, is not distractions.

The problem is that we're so

distracted by distractions that we

don't even know we're distracted.

And I think we could view this as the

definition of living on autopilot.

Most of us don't realize were on auto,

automatic pilot because inherent to

that experience is a lack of awareness.

We're going through the motions and

it just feels like, oh, this is what

I'm supposed to be doing because

we're not really questioning why we're

doing what we're doing and what we're

responding to and what is guiding us.

And one of the early gifts of

mindfulness practice is that it

shows us just how unmindful and

unaware we usual, usually are.

It can be, it can be a bit of a

painful discovery to realize that.

Like, wow, I spent the last five

years, 10 years, maybe 50 years of my

life, sort of with my head down, going

through the motions without actually

asking, why am I doing what I'm doing.

But if we can let go of what has happened

previously and view this moment as

the beginning of the rest of our life,

well, this is a moment of waking up.

Waking up to the life

that is in front of you.

The life that you only have right now.

And there could be a lot of input

coming in, but if you can be aware of

it and maybe put up some boundaries

around it and choose intentionally

how you want to respond to it, well,

now you're shifting from living a

life that was unconscious and asleep

to one that is intentional and awake.

And we have the capacity

for that in each moment.

It might be hard, especially when there

is a lot of stimulation, especially when

we are inundated with things from social

media and lots of bells and whistles.

But this is the work we're

doing here and it's big work.

So thank you for your practice.

Let's continue that practice

with today's meditation.

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