Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about something called the realization gap. So in meditation, we can have quite extraordinary and often quite transformative experiences. We might touch a deep sense of wholeness, calm or even oneness. We might have very important and precious insights and realizations about the nature of our mind or the nature of life.

We might see some of our habitual patterns and really understand ourselves better. But just because we have these experiences in meditation, doesn't always mean that life is suddenly going to become easy and that we'll never again, become angry or reactive or afraid or fall into our bad habits. It doesn't mean we won't make mistakes or that we'll experience difficulties. You know, they're still all going to be there. So this can sometimes be kind of frustrating.

There's a feeling of there being a gap between our realizations in meditation and our ability to live those understandings. And sometimes this can feel like a bit of a messy and difficult process. It's very common to get frustrated with this gap between our realizations and our everyday life. And we might start to think of meditation as one practice that we d. And then there's the rest of our life as a separate thing.

The truth is is that the real mindfulness practice is our life. It's taking what we learned on the cushion in meditation and integrating it into our daily lives as best we can. It's seeing how much we can close that realization gap and live our everyday life with more awareness and kindness. And yes, it's a bit tricky. It really requires has a lot of patience, persistence, and self-compassion to live with awareness.

But this really is where the rubber meets the road. It's important to remember go easy on yourself as the realization gap is really normal. It's one thing to know something and another thing to be able to embody it ongoing. But just remember that integrating mindfulness into your life is not so much about getting difficulties in life. It's about how we relate to them when they arrive.

Can we respond to our challenges with the same kind of calm and clarity that we had in meditation? Can we bring kindness and compassion to situations that otherwise we might've become reactive or angry? Can we be patient and gentle with ourselves along the journey of all of this? This is the invitation of mindful living. And when not expecting life to just magically become easy and escape all the difficult stuff and magically be transformed in a heartbeat. But instead, simply knowing that it's about bringing our own innate wisdom and awareness to each and every aspect of our life as best we can. And then we try again. As always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us.

And just inviting you now to begin to settle in for today's meditation.