Hey, welcome back to Day Two of our Un-challenge. In yesterday session, we explored what it takes to start to unwind some of our deep tension, connecting to that place within us that is more still, that is able to be in relationship to our moment to moment experience without immediately putting it in the category of good or bad, right or wrong. In today's session, I want us to explore why we might actually avoid that stillness, why we might avoid wanting to slow down and why many of us actually get caught up in our addiction to busy-ness. Now that might sound a little out there because I know most of us would say, "Oh I don't like being busy. I have so much going on.

It's creating my stress. I know it's creating my stress. If anything, I want to be able to slow down." but then sometimes we have the opportunity to slow down and be still, and there's something uncomfortable about it. It's as if like, "Okay, I can be here for a little bit, but I'm starting to feel a little off or there's something uncomfortable that's arising that's making me want to immediately go on my phone or distract myself or even read a book." So what is that about? Well often the reason we stay in patterns of busy-ness, even though we say we don't want to is because it helps distract us from feeling something that maybe we're not ready to feel or we've actively avoided feeling. So for instance, if maybe there was some loss in your life, and there was an experience of grief that came up that you didn't really have the opportunity to process.

Well, one of the things that our work can do and being busy can do is it can distract us from having to feel that. Something like grief is painful. Sadness is painful. And the coping mechanism is to get engaged in our work, keep looking forward, keep our head down, nose to the grind stone. And again, it's a well-intentioned mechanism internally.

But if we keep going like that for a long period of time, it's not like the grief or sadness just goes away. It just lingers in the background and actually gets heavier and heavier and heavier causing us to maybe feel numb or feel like we need to keep working compulsively in order to make it through the day. And then any opportunity we have for some stillness, there's some subconscious avoidance. Can you see how that could potentially happen? And it sometimes happens with bigger experiences like grief, but other times it happens because we're afraid of what we might experience in our mind or our thoughts feel like they're all over the place and we don't really want to meet that. And so part of this process of actually unwinding, reconnecting to yourself, and learning to inhabit a space of more equanimity, balance, ease actually involves navigating some of these experiences along the way where we realize, "Ooh, I'm actually scared to be still because I don't know if I can be with what is arising." Now let's first acknowledge that that may be true in some circumstances.

If there is a really difficult experience that's there, we don't need to open up the flood gates and just dive into all of our pain. We might want to have some support like a therapist. And so if you are navigating something difficult, I do encourage you to find some proper support for that. But a lot of times, we do have the inner resources to navigate what's arising. We just need to remind ourselves that we have those resources.

And so one thing I'm going to encourage us to do here, as you go about your day and you notice that you have these opportunities to be still, to relax, but there's something about it that maybe feels a little uncomfortable, when you feel that feeling of discomfort, sadness, stress, boredom dis-ease of any sort, just take a breath. And then say, "Your welcome here too. Your welcome here too." And we're saying that to this part of our experience that we're subconsciously avoiding. And what this does is it sort of brings it into our awareness so that we can see it. Okay, there's some sadness here.

Take a breath, ground my nervous system, and I'm inviting it into my awareness rather than subconsciously pushing it away. And by saying your welcome here too, your actually embodying the part of you that does have the resources to be with this experience, the part of you that knows that it's empowered and can navigate some discomfort as it's arising. It's not like you can't get through difficult things. It's just we have these subconscious patterns of avoiding them. So we're going to go a little bit more into this in today's meditation, but the simple strategy I invite you to look at it as you go about your day is, as these experiences arise, take a deep breath and just say to it, "your welcome here too." And notice how that shifts your relationship to the things that you might typically push away, which itself is a form of tension.

Try that out and let settle in for today's meditation.