Hi, welcome back to

your Daily Mindfulness.

In today's session, I want to

talk about thoughts and alignment.

So many people who get into meditation,

mindfulness, or even therapy or

anything to do with personal development

are often frustrated by thoughts.

There's a feeling of my

mind's all over the place.

I can't calm it down.

It's creating all of

this extra stress for me.

And what we ended up doing

is pathologizing the thinking

mind, pathologizing our brain

for being all over the place.

You often hear things like I can't

focus, or my mind constantly

thinks about this and this and

this, or I can't settle it down.

Like I need something like

meditation to calm my mind.

I needed to train my mind.

That's the one I hear a lot of.

I need to really train

my mind or tame my mind.

There's merit to it.

I'm a meditation teacher.

Certainly meditation does help

calm the mind, train our focus

and there's huge utility to that.

However, I do want to also say that a

mind that is bouncing from one thing

to another, or is agitated isn't

just an indication or isn't always an

indication that you just can't focus.

It might instead be an indication

that something is out of

alignment with your life.

I mean, think about maybe a difficult

conversation you had once and it just,

it lingered in you the rest of the day.

Maybe you said something you wish

you didn't say and the person,

you know, there was just a,

there's just a look on their face.

And you were like, oh, I probably

shouldn't have said that, but you

didn't apologize or anything afterwards.

And you just went to bed that

night and your mind was all over

the place thinking about it.

Right?

Is that because you can't focus or

because something felt out of alignment?

You felt like, Hmm, that probably

wasn't the right thing to do and

I haven't yet rectified it yet or

had a fuller conversation about it.

It's still lingering in the system.

And that's a minor example.

There are so many things

that we do across a lifetime.

All these little decisions where we

can temporarily abandon ourselves,

an inner knowing, and it causes

us to get out of alignment.

And as humans, we tend to have a

very high tolerance for that, which

is why we can go months, years,

or decades sort of bearing it.

Where something doesn't feel quite right,

but just like, okay, well I keep going.

And then it starts to catch up to us.

And the mind's all over the place.

We feel a little agitated.

And I have a teacher who says, many

times we paint ourselves into a

corner and then we do meditation

to feel comfortable there.

You know?

So this is an example of like we're

making decisions that are actually out

of alignment with the deeper truth within

us, but we feel the agitation and the

stress that that has created, and then we

go, Ooh, I need to meditate to calm down.

Maybe.

Or maybe we need to actually start

taking some responsibility for the

decisions that we're making and whether

they're taking us into alignment

or out of alignment with our life.

So my main invitation to you today

is instead of looking at thoughts

as simply a symptom of a broken

brain or an inability to focus,

what if you use that as a compass?

What if your mind being all over the

place was actually an internal agitation

of something being out of alignment?

What would that be inviting you to

look at, to listen, to, and to get back

into alignment, to really deep inquiry?

But it's a doorway into actually leading

your life in a way that is genuinely

fulfilling and genuinely yours.

Thank you for your practice.

Let's settle in for today's meditation.