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Time and Mind

Melli O'Brien

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Melli O'Brien

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Time and Mind

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, I'm going to explore the

relationship between time and our minds.

So this immediate moment may seem

small as a concept of time, but as an

experience of time, it's never ending.

And when we take our seat in meditation,

we also take our seat in the timelessness

and the aliveness of the present moment.

But of course, we also get pulled out

of that seat in the now, again and

again, by the activity of the mind.

And if you watch this activity of the mind

really closely, what you begin to see is

the great majority of what pulls us out

of the present moment is thoughts about

the past and thoughts about the future.

So the mind has this tendency to

continually go back and replay, you know,

our mistakes, our regrets, our memories,

our whole personal story from the past.

And then for most of us even more so,

it goes into the future, anticipating

the future, maybe fearing what might

happen in the future, replaying

hopes and expectations and desires.

Doing this again and again.

So when you observe what the mind is

doing, you see that most of what it's

doing is this sort of oscillation from the

past to the future, back and forth again.

But when we remove time from

the mind, a lot of that activity

just very naturally subsides.

A lot of clutter in the

mind naturally quiets down.

So how do you remove time from the mind?

By focusing your full

attention in the now.

So for instance, right now, can you just

get a sense of letting go of thinking

about your past and your future and just

being fully here in this present moment?

Bringing your full attention to the

sounds, the sights, the feelings,

the sensations of this this moment.

And noticing the effect

that that has on the mind.

So it's really only in those

moments, when we let go of past

and future, that we experienced the

fullness and the richness of now.

And the more time we spend in the

now, the more we understand it's

timeless and ever present nature.

And the more we understand that

our feelings of inner peace and

wholeness are deeply dependent

on our ability to be present.

So my invitation to you today is simple.

As much as possible, try to remove

time from the mind and return to

the present moment again and again.

So thank you for your practice

and your presence here with us.

And now let's settle in

for today's meditation.

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