Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. You know, we face a great challenge from the moment that we're born, a challenge, perhaps greater than any creature that's lived on this little blue planet. And that challenge is living with a human mind. Now I know our minds, of course are also, uh, they hold an incredible power. You know, with the human mind, we've sent rockets into space, invented open-heart surgery and created a much more comfortable and convenient world, at least in the West.

But the mind really is a double-edged sword. You know, the dark side of the human mind is that it tends to haunt our inner worlds with worries, fixation on problems and endless melodramas and calculations that can cause us anxiety, stress, and suffering. So why do we struggle like this? You know, the reason we struggle with our minds has a lot to do with the way our minds evolved. For most of the last 200,000 years of human evolution, we lived in hunter-gatherer tribes. You know, it's only been a really short amount of time that humans have lived in a way that's anything like what we're living in today.

So, of course, our minds still operate much the same way they did in those caveman days. You know, in the caveman days, life was really dangerous and difficult. So to stay alive, our ancestors had to be constantly on the lookout for dangers and threats and problems to be solved. So the humans who were constantly anxious alert and on the lookout for danger, they were the ones who survived and passed on their genes. So, even though we live in a much more safe and comfortable world today, the mind we inherited from them is still always on the lookout for threats and problems all the time.

You know, you might notice that even when everything's going okay for you, the mind still tends to ruminate and worry and fixate on problems. But instead of worrying about saber tooth tigers or attacks from rival clans, we worry about our relationships, our health, our careers. Now, constant stress, worry and fixation on problems may have been a great survival strategy in the past, but these days it's unhelpful and painful to be constantly stuck in that mode of being. It makes us anxious, negative, and disconnected from the beauty of life all around us. This is one of the reasons we need to train our minds.

So what mindfulness offers us as a tried, tested and evidence-based path to unwind and transform these patterns of the mind that causes stress, anxiety, and suffering. With regular practice, you become a more calmu kind and clear headed person, an island of sanity and peace and increasingly frantic world. So in the spirit of knowing all of this, I invite you to join me today for today's meditation.