Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I want to talk about distractions. We live in a world with a lot of distractions. It's a big topic of conversation within the mindfulness community, but the global community, especially with netflix series like the Social Network coming out, highlighting all the different ways that social media can pull at our attention and it's vying for our attention. And it often pins distractions as a bad thing, or stimulation as a bad thing.

Then we can go into that whole argument and the ethical argument of how much stimulation were receiving. But the problem in my mind is, is not distractions. The problem is that we're so distracted by distractions that we don't even know we're distracted. And I think we could view this as the definition of living on autopilot. Most of us don't realize were on auto, automatic pilot because inherent to that experience is a lack of awareness.

We're going through the motions and it just feels like, oh, this is what I'm supposed to be doing because we're not really questioning why we're doing what we're doing and what we're responding to and what is guiding us. And one of the early gifts of mindfulness practice is that it shows us just how unmindful and unaware we usual, usually are. It can be, it can be a bit of a painful discovery to realize that. Like, wow, I spent the last five years, 10 years, maybe 50 years of my life, sort of with my head down, going through the motions without actually asking, why am I doing what I'm doing. But if we can let go of what has happened previously and view this moment as the beginning of the rest of our life, well, this is a moment of waking up.

Waking up to the life that is in front of you. The life that you only have right now. And there could be a lot of input coming in, but if you can be aware of it and maybe put up some boundaries around it and choose intentionally how you want to respond to it, well, now you're shifting from living a life that was unconscious and asleep to one that is intentional and awake. And we have the capacity for that in each moment. It might be hard, especially when there is a lot of stimulation, especially when we are inundated with things from social media and lots of bells and whistles.

But this is the work we're doing here and it's big work. So thank you for your practice. Let's continue that practice with today's meditation.