Hey, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I'm going to share a four-step acronym that you can use in moments of stress, when you're feeling anxious, or if you just want to drop into presence more deeply. The acronym is STOP and it stands for S, stop, T, take a breath, three, observe what's going on and then P, proceed with presence. So I figured maybe we could practice this together and real time to get a sense of what it's like to apply it. So in this moment, let's just stop.

It might be simply a physical stopping. Settling into a stillness within our bodies. Also a, an internal stopping. Noticing what it's like to be still. Then we'll move on to T, which is to very simply take a breath.

So let's do that together, breathing in through the nose. And out through the mouth. The breath is often the low hanging fruit when it comes to settling our nervous system. So maybe you already start to feel a sense of ease having taken that breath and remaining connected to the breath as we rest here. And then we have O, and this stands for observing what's happening.

So in this place of stillness, just watch what's going on in the mind right now. Are we caught up in the future? The past? Rumination about something? Judgements? Self-criticism? And can we watch that without being so caught up in it? In the same way we might watch a stream moving down a mountain or a cloud passing through the sky. And lastly is P, proceed with presence. And this is an invitation to take that quality of awareness that we just started to cultivate and bring it into the next moments. So often when we're caught up in stress and we're overwhelmed it's because we have been disconnected from this quality of mindfulness.

So having taken a few moments to connect back into it, now we're encouraged to bring it back into our lives a bit more intentionally. So notice what it's like to be engaged in this in real time. Stop, take a breath, observe what's going on and proceed with presence. This is something that you can bring into many moments of your life, both the stressful ones, but also the neutral ones where you're just trying to connect more deeply to the present moment. We'll do some more of this in the meditation.

I'll talk to you there and take care.