Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. My name is Cory Muscara, and I'll be guiding you through this seven day series. Each day, I'll share a short video on meditation with a new theme, designed to help you reduce stress and live a happier life. These daily themes will build on each other, and I'm particularly excited to share the lesson on day six. All of this will take less than 15 minutes a day, but if you stick with it, you'll gradually start to see your quality of life improving.

You know, I'm imagining you're here because you're going through something difficult — strained at work, a tough relationship or breakup, or just the general struggles of life. So I just want to say, I appreciate you being here and taking this time to take a proactive role in your own health and wellbeing. There are a lot of people that continue on living with their stress and not knowing that there's anything they can do about it. And the fact that you're here is saying something about you and your willingness to, um, to do some work. And one of the promises of mindfulness meditation is a life with less stress and more peace.

So I'm excited to start this journey with you. In today's session, we're going to discuss, creating more space for our stress — what I like to call building your stress container. So if you think about it, often for me, one of the first things that comes up when there's stress is my mind likes to compound the stress. And so the thoughts arise, oh, here we go again. It's going to be a bad day.

I hate feeling this way. It's bad for my health, bad for my wellbeing. Nobody else seems to be this stressed. Does that resonate, maybe just a little bit? We end up doubling tripling, quadrupling the amount of stress we feel because we get really tight around it, constricted around it. I sometimes like to think of the metaphor of a cow and a cow path.

So if you put a cow in a small confined place, they're going to feel stressed and overwhelmed and very tense. But if you take that same cow and you give it a wide open cow pasture, immediately, there's a sense of ease. And so in this series, we're going to be talking about a lot of different strategies and ways to direct your attention away from the stress, how to be more calm, more settled, ways to work with it. But for this first session, the first foundational step is just to give it some space. So we can do that right now, as you sit here, as you watch and listen.

What's it like to attune to your internal experience? What's it like to notice the thoughts moving on through your mind? Or maybe even a sense of stress and your body Instead of immediately trying to get rid of it, change it, fix it, or think positively. We're just going to give it some space. And this is like taking ourselves out of that small confined place and giving the mind a wide open cow pasture. Hmm. Maybe you can start to feel some of the ease that gets cultivated with that.

And if not, that's okay as well. Some of this stuff takes time practice, which is why we have the daily meditation and the full seven days together. So in a short while we will do the meditation together and we'll go a little deeper into this concept. But I just want to say thank you again for your practice and for taking this time for yourself. It's a privilege to be on this journey with you.

And I'm excited to go into the meditation. Talk soon, take care.