Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about deep rest. So one of the things I've found for people that I've worked with is that many of us actually need training in rest and relaxation. We have certain ideas of what that would look like. And usually it comes in the form of maybe taking a break, having a cup of coffee, or going on vacation.

But I think what many people find, and myself included, before getting into this work is that we can go through those experiences, but still feel an inner torment or an inner chaos, agitation. Think about any time that maybe you've been on vacation, but your mind is still at work or your mind still is not giving yourself permission to really be there. So, it's one thing to take a break and it's another thing to really inhabit deep rest. The way I like to define deep rest is letting go of our inner struggle. Letting go of our inner struggle.

Because we can take time away from our external world. We can shift the elements of our external world to be a little bit more peaceful, but if we're still creating internal agitation, if we're still fighting the emotions that we're experiencing, the thoughts that are moving through our mind, the sensations we're feeling in our body or any aspect of our sensory experience, that's still a form of tension. I mean, think about it. Anything that you have that you put force against is going to create more tension. And this is what many of us tend to do on an ongoing basis, even when we have the opportunity to take a break.

So the way I like to think about this and work with this, like how do we actually let go of this inner struggle, is to practice curiosity over contraction. Contraction can happen at the psychological level, the emotional level, the physical level. Psychological being this, this shouldn't be here, so thoughts. The emotional level, we get angry about the experience being there. The physical level, we actually tense around an already tense experience.

So instead of contraction, just practice offering curiosity. Curiosity, doesn't have an agenda. It's not trying to get you somewhere. It's not trying to change the experience. It's just meeting it with an open hand.

And when we can do that with our internal experience, even if there's already tension. Right? Think about how you've had tension perhaps in your life, but then you get mad that there's tension there. Well, that's just another form of tension. So we can meet tension with curiosity. Oh, what is this like right now? We can meet stress with curiosity.

What is this like right now? And in that way, we're creating a container to hold the experience that's spacious and allows the experience to shift, to change, to pass, to complete. But eventually allows us to drop into a state of deep rest where we've let go of some of this inner struggle that we're so often engaged in. So something to think about, to take into your meditation practice. Thank you for your practice and let's settle in for today's meditation.