Hi, and welcome to Day Two of our seven day Meditation Challenge. My name's Melli O'Brien and I'm so excited to be joining with Cory Muscara and the thousands of you who are coming together as part of the Mindfulness.com community. And a big part of Mindfulness.com always has been feeling the power and the connection that comes from being part of a caring community like this one. Well, so I hope you enjoyed exploring with Cory yesterday, the what if to what is practice? It's one of my favorites. Today I'm going to offer you some insights about healing negative emotions through mindfulness and self-compassion.

So when we're going to do and stressful times in life, like most of us are right now, some pretty uncomfortable emotions tend to arise. Now our usual response to these emotions is that we want them to go away. That's quite natural. But so we often start to struggle against the emotion by going into our heads and thinking about the problem over and over again. So we ruminate about it.

We worry about it. We try to fix it and figure it out. We might even try suppressing the feelings or ignoring them and just soldiering on. But with that strategy, in time, those emotions do tend to come to the surface again. So we tend to apply a lot of mental effort in these ways, kind of trying to a force the difficult emotions to go away quickly.

But when we're going through really hard times, it's actually really natural to feel these kinds of emotions. And fighting them or pushing them down doesn't make them move on faster. When we experienced painful or difficult emotions, it's best actually not to go into your head and ruminate and overthink the situation. In fact, the research shows that this habit of overthinking actually tends to prolong difficult feelings and make them bigger. So that's not what we want.

Instead what we can do is use self-compassion to kind of create a comforting and healing inner environment in which those emotions can come to the surface where they can be felt and acknowledged, where they can be met with kindness, patience, compassion, and understanding, and they're allowed to unfold and heal in their own time. So we really just create this container and then we entrust the passage of time to take care of the rest. And it could be moments, it could be days, it could be years before the emotion passes. So we really just genuinely have to fully let go of our agendas to change the emotion. And instead of fighting with the emotion, we switch the focus to caring for them.

And if you think about this new attitude, it's such a kindness towards ourselves because instead of fighting with ourselves in the midst of a difficult time, we're waging peace with ourselves in the middle of it all. So as you traverse these difficult times we're in, just remembering it's pretty natural that difficult emotions are going to arise from time to time. And when they do, seeing if you can remember, instead of overthinking with them or struggling with them, just make your sole task creating this compassionate container of awareness, allowing the emotion to arise and unfold, and when the time is right, letting it dissolve. Today, I'm going to guide you through a self-compassion meditation where you can practice this skill and then take it forward with you into the days to come. So thank you for your practice and your presence here with us.

And now let's settle in for today's meditation.