Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to talk about the habit of running from ourselves. This is an interesting topic because there's really nowhere we can go to escape our own minds. It will be with us wherever we go. Far better then to sit down, make friends with the mind, and come to a mutual place of understanding and care.

So, probably by now, you've already discovered that you can't outrun yourself. You know, if we're feeling very stressed, even if we go on holidays to a very beautiful place, when we're there in a different environment, away from the difficulties of daily life, the mind still brings the same thoughts and feelings with us. Now, if you are on holidays, maybe after a few days, you feel a little bit different, but still the mindful follows us wherever we go and tends to start up the same patterns again and again. So soon that same kind of pattern of stress returns. And even if you just look at day to day life, when we try to distract ourselves, if something's very difficult, very challenging, we often try to numb or get away from it.

Maybe we don't really want to be with ourselves. You don't want to be with that feeling, with those thoughts. So we turn on the TV, we go online or whatever it might be, but we find ways to distract ourselves thinking that we're escaping the thought or the feeling. But of course, as most of us have found, at some point we have to turn the TV off, the distraction is over, and then we find ourselves back in the same place again. So through meditation, we create an environment, a space where we can sit and learn to get comfortable with the mind, no matter how it appears.

Happy, sad, busy, quiet, it doesn't matter. And through that process of our coming to understand the mind, we find a place of peace and ease in the body, in the mind, where we can be happy and content, no matter where we find ourselves in life. So as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And let's now settling for today's meditation.