Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I want to talk about taking care of your mental health. I'll start by saying how you take care of your present self will impact the mental health of your future self. In many ways, self care is future you care. And this can be sometimes hard to navigate in the present moment because sometimes we feel like we have capacity for a lot in this moment, but we also know that it's a pattern of ours to push or to, to go to our full capacity in each moment and then we end up burning ourselves out.

And so sometimes self care looks like recognizing that, you know what, this is a pattern of mine to push, to push, to push. And yeah, just because I can do it. Doesn't necessarily mean that I should do it. And also doesn't mean that it's not going to have an impact on my future self. And so by being able to relate to your present self with that wisdom and that attention and not overriding, you're actually taking care of the mental health of your future self.

And this is just a perspective that we can integrate on a day-to-day basis because sometimes we need to orient to the future us that we are taking care of. The present us sometimes tends to overestimate what we can do in a moment. Often we underestimate what we're capable of, but a lot of times we overestimate our, our bandwidth for something. Then instead end up pushing, pushing, pushing, and then, you know, at the end of the day or the end of the week or the end of a couple of years, we just feel completely exhausted and completely burnt out. So my invitation to you around your mental health is to continue to explore how you're taking care of your present self and how you feel that is relating to the mental health of your future self.

One, you can trust that self care is taken care of future you. But also with future you in mind, how might you want to relate to your present self differently knowing that sometimes you've been through these patterns before where you think it's okay, but it's actually not okay. And if you were to hold that in your mind, how might you do something different in this moment? Mental health is, is hugely important and I hope we can take it as seriously as we do physical health. It is, our mind is the filter for, for each of our moments. And if we're not taking care of ourselves, life can just become a lot harder.

So thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.