Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to explore how we can be truly living, or we can be just lost in thought. So as we go about our daily life, we tend to miss so many moments because we're lost in a haze of distraction and wondering thoughts. So we might be sitting having a cup of tea, but we don't actually taste it because we're thinking about our to-do list or our holiday plans. And when we're talking to someone, maybe we don't truly listen because our mind is elsewhere.

Then even when we are on holidays laying there in the sun, we don't really feel the warmth of the sun on our skin or hear the crashing waves because we're worrying about something or we're lost in a mind that won't stop racing. Now if we're not careful, we end up missing out on the actual living of our lives because we're lost in such a trance of thinking. Mindfulness gently wakes us back up again, reminding us over and over again to inhabit our actual lives. It teaches us by direct experience that nothing is more important than being awake to the unfolding experience of now. That's what we crave at the deepest level.

We crave the experience of being fully alive. So mindful living is really about this constant remembering to wake up from the dream of thought and be fully alive to what's happening right now. Mindfulness is not a forceful push back into the present moment. It's really not hard work. It's just this very gentle invitation to come home to ourselves.

So we just choose to let go of distraction. Let go of being lost in the trance of thinking. And instead we just re-arrive in the here and now. So today's invitation is simple. Just make an intention to keep gently choosing to let go of being lost in thought and come home to the now.

Just doing that as many times as you can today. Gently let go of distraction and focusing again and again on being alive in the present moment. So with that let's settle in for today's meditation. And as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us.