Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session we're going to talk about meditation in relationship to stress and suffering. Now you've been engaging in meditation for some time now, and I imagine you have a more nuanced appreciation and understanding for the practice than the average person. But still there can sometimes be a feeling that meditation is a way to, I don't know, tolerate suffering. It's a way to just get through life.

And I know a lot of people that haven't engaged in the practice often, often think that. It's just like, okay, just breathe through it, try and tolerate it, grit our teeth. And you might already have this understanding, but I really want to emphasize it again, which is that meditation is, it's not about learning to tolerate suffering or stress. It's about learning to connect to the part of you that is expansive enough to hold the full human experience. And that's a very different thing.

As you've engaged in your meditation practice, I'm sure you've seen that there's this capacity to, to watch your thoughts from a place of stillness, groundedness and ease. Those thoughts that usually torment us, that create constriction, that trigger our emotions of stress, anxiety, fear, self-doubt, despair. When we can watch those and hold those, we're connecting more to that part of us that is expansive, not constricted, but, but large, that can see everything that's happening and can actually be grounded within it. Our awareness of fear is not fearful. Our awareness of pain is not in pain.

Our awareness of boredom is not bored. And so there's, there's some dimension of us that is large enough to hold the full human experience. And the more we connect with that, the more you could even say, we identify with that, the less suffering that is created through the things, moving through our awareness, like thoughts, like emotions, like sensations. We'll still feel and experience all of that, but who we are will be perceived and felt as bigger. And so in the same way, if you take a teaspoon of dirt and put it in a cup of water, the water will get really dirty, but you take that same teaspoon and you put it in a lake, it will hardly have an impact.

What we're connecting to is the lake of our minds, the klake of our being. So I hope you can keep that in mind in your meditation practice. And fortunately, we'll have some time to apply it now. So thanks for your practice and let's settle in for today's meditation.