Hi, and welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about doing nothing. There's a Japanese word called boketto, which means to gaze vacantly into the distance without thinking about anything specific. I've been increasingly interested in the value of doing nothing. And not the meditation kind of doing nothing, but the staring at a tree, letting the mind go wherever kind of nothing.

No agenda, no trying to be aware, just letting your mind do whatever it wants to do. There's something deeply restorative and healing about this for the nervous system. It gives us a chance to, to recalibrate, to let the snow in a metaphorical snow globe settle. And sometimes redirecting the mind can be a subtle form of oppression against the part of you that actually needs to be scattered and constraintless. So there's a balance here between meditation and time for no meditation.

Uh, buketto feels similar to the concept of useless window gazing, which I've talked about in the past, where you just let yourself stare out of a window without any agenda. So a simple suggestion for integrating the potential nourishing benefits of this into a meditation practice is just to simply spend the first few minutes of your practice, letting the mind do whatever. You know, we, we kind of do this already. Just taking the mind to settle, take a few deep breaths, relaxing into being present. And you should notice that there's, there's something settling about creating a supportive and encouraging container for this, similar to placing a snow globe on a stable surface.

Things finally have the chance to settle and that lack of agitation from doing nothing allows whatever internal agitation that is present to sort of run its course and to reintegrate. And then, and this is where I see a lot of value, once the snow has settled a bit, the thoughts, the energy, the emotions, we often notice that the mind is more inclined to collect itself on one point, such as the breath or to simply be more tuned to what is happening. It's almost as if it needs permission to do what it wants first, before it will collect itself. So the less force you can bring to the cultivation of presence, the better. And I hope you can take this into your consideration and, uh, give yourself some space to truly do nothing or put differently, to allow your mind to do everything, whatever it wants.

So this is buketto. Try to integrate it into your day in a way that feels meaningful, especially if you feel called to explore this. It could just be a few seconds, could be a few minutes and it could just be at the beginning of your meditation practice. Thank you for your practice and let's settle in.