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How to Meditate: Meditation 101 for Beginners

10 Science-Backed Benefits of Meditation

What is Meditation?

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Melli O'Brien

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The War of the Beetles

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

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness.

Today, we're going to talk

about nurturing inner strength.

So on the slope of Bragg's Peak

in Northern Canada lies the

ruin of a gigantic ancient tree.

Scientists say that it's lived

there for over 400 years.

During the course of its long life,

it endured huge storms, gale force

winds, seven huge avalanches, and was

actually struck by lightning 12 times.

But through all of that, it

remained resilient and survived.

However, one day an army of tiny

beetles began to invade the tree

and attack it from the inside.

These tiny, weensy, little insects

slowly gnawed away inside the tree,

destroying its inner strength with

their tiny, but ceaseless attacks.

This titan of the forest, which storms

and winds had not bent, which time had not

diminished and lightening in avalanches

could not destroy, was at last leveled

to the ground by tiny little beetles, so

small and fragile that you could just pick

one up and crush it between your fingers.

This story serves as a great metaphor for

what can happen with our mental strength.

In my work with people over the last

decade, I've found that most of us

can actually summon up the resolve and

strength needed to get through times of

great crisis when they really have to.

It's actually the small, everyday,

unhelpful thoughts that eat

away at us from the inside out.

It's the gnawing negative thoughts,

the worries, the ruminations, the

self doubt, the resentment, the

dissatisfaction, the craving, the fear.

This is what pulls us away from our

rootedness in the present moment and

our wisdom, clarity, and peace of

mind and destroys our inner strength.

However, what I've also seen is that

through mindfulness, we can learn to

identify when we're getting stuck in

those kinds of unhelpful thoughts.

We can let them go and return

our attention to the peace of

the present moment, our place of

steadiness and mental strength.

Every single time we do this, this

pattern of noticing unhelpful thoughts,

letting them go, returning to the

present moment to our strength, every

time we do that, we grow resilience,

calm, happiness, and strength inside.

And that core of strength we

can carry with us through all

the ups and downs of life.

This is why we keep doing this practice.

So as always, thank you for being here.

Thank you for your practice

and your presence here.

Let's settle in now

for today's meditation.

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