Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about how we can create some mental space when we're getting stressed, anxious, or caught up in unhelpful thoughts and emotions. In short, I'm going to show you how, when we're in doubt, we're going to learn to zoom out. So there's a metaphor I'll offer you here. If you put a tablespoon of salt into a cup of water, it's going to be intensely salty and unpleasant to the taste.

But if you put that same teaspoon into a swimming pool of water, it'll be barely perceptible. And in the same way, when our minds begin to fixate on our problems, our insecurities, our anxieties and struggles, they tend to feel really intense and overwhelming. The mind can get really constricted around them, but the more mental space we can surround them with the less they bother us. Mindfulness allows us to make this choice to zoom out and taking a much greater perspective of what's happening in any given moment. So in any given moment, it's not just that problems rolling around in our heads that's happening in any given moment.

For instance, there might be also birds, singing trees gently moving in the wind, the sun shining. And on an even broader perspective, the planets are spinning and time is moving on. There's a whole kind of mystery unfolding all around us. And there may be a lot that we can be grateful for and appreciative for in that moment, as well as the things that are difficult. So the invitation here is not to ignore the difficult things, but it's just that when we zoom out into this broader awareness, it allows us to hold whatever's bothering us in a larger container.

It's like we surround that problem with a calm, steady and broad awareness and suddenly it doesn't seem so overwhelming a lot of the time. We view it from a greater perspective. So we don't have to try and get rid of our mental struggles or unpleasant emotions, but instead when we're caught up in them, we can just notice, first of all, that we're caught up and then we can choose to zoom out into a larger awareness of all that's going on in that moment. So we're going to practice this a little bit more in today's meditation, but today in your life and ongoing, see if you can just remember when in doubt you can just zoom out. So as always thank you for your practice and your presence here.

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