Hey, welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about building your stress container. So what does that mean? Well, have you ever noticed that sometimes when you experience something difficult, like a stressful experience, there's a tendency to compound the stress by trying to push it away, getting caught up in thoughts of why am I stressed? What's wrong with me? Nobody else seems to be struggling this much. And when we get caught in those thought and emotional patterns, What happens? Does it make the stress magically disappear? Or does it make the stress get a little worse. In my experience and in many of the people I work with, it tends to make things get worse because what we're doing is pushing back against an already difficult and tense experience.

And so when it comes to managing stress, the first step is just to simply soften and relax into it, to give ourselves permission to have the experience that we're having, rather than adding what we might call a secondary layer of suffering and pain to an already difficult experience. So the mantra or phrase I like to use to create this stress container, that container that allows us to hold our stress is: this moment, it's like this. This moment, it's like this. This is a phrase I got from the meditation teacher, Vinnie Ferraro. And what I love about it is that as soon as I say it personally, it immediately settles in, settles me into how this moment is right now.

So let's just try it, right. This moment, it's like this,.You're just looking at me, the screen. Maybe there's what you can hear. So what you can feel in your body. This moment, it's like this.

Now, this is something you can take with you throughout the day. You can use it in good moments, but you can also use it in stressful, painful moments. And what it will help you do is stop to, stop creating that secondary suffering that we can so easily get caught in. The thoughts of say, this shouldn't be here. Why am I having this experience? I should be calm.

I'm a meditator now. Whatever the narrative is that we get caught in. Instead of getting caught in that we just go this moment, it's like this. We take a breath, relax into the experience as it's there. The more we do that, the more we build our minds capacity, our minds container to hold the experience without creating more stress.

So try this out today. I'll talk to you soon. Thank you for your practice and take care.