Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about a two step practice to help you find answers to life's challenges and questions. So in the past years I've often found that when I think that I don't have the answer to life's big questions and challenges, I often actually do have the answer. The only thing is is that the answer that might be present might be scary or disruptive to my comfortable routines, or it might involve me taking a path with uncertainty or fear. So instead of listening to what I deep down already know, I just keep tossing the problem around in my head for days or weeks or even months.

And I've seen how, you know, when we try to figure things out with a really busy or anxious mind, it's really hard to see things clearly. And although in these situations, what we might do is seek other people's opinions or perspectives on our decisions and challenges, no one will ever know our situation like we do, and no one else can feel what's happening deep in our hearts. So ultimately only we can know what's right for us and find our own answers. So these days I've been practicing a two-step process to kind of feel into the answers, to life's questions and confusions. Instead of ruminating about the situation, I try to make room for this practice instead.

So I thought I'd share it with you and see if it resonates, see if it sounds useful. So the first thing I do is I just become still and present and just kind of drop out of all that rumination in the mind and drop into the moment, into my body, steady my mind. And then I start to imagine different paths that I could take or different choices that I could make and really play them out in my mind and then see how that feels. What I find is that almost always, there's a stronger sense of an inner yes in one direction and often a feeling of no, or just a sense that something's not quite right in another direction. And this two-step process of inner listening has worked many, many times for me and really helped me cultivate both a kind of radical self honesty, and also self-trust.

So my invitation to you today and ongoing is if this resonates with you, if it sounds like it might be useful, have a little experiment with this practice and just see how it goes. If you can take some time to really listen deeply to yourself for the answers you seek, you might just discover that you already have more wisdom, clarity, and understanding inside than you realized. So as always thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And now let's begin to settle in for today's meditation.