Hey, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, we're going to talk about a perspective shift practice called zooming in and zooming out. So let's try something. What do you see? Just make a mental note in your mind of what you see. Color.

Shape. Anything else? Get really clear. Focus hard. Capture all the detail. Okay, good.

You can stop. So what'd you notice? If we were in person, you could tell me, but since we're not, I'm going to take some liberty and presume what you might have noted. Chances are you noticed something that was green, you noticed a square pot, maybe some color, the blue, the whiteness, the general shape. But did you also notice the space around the flower? Did you also notice what's in the background? Did you notice what's around your screen or in the space around you? Now I kind of played a trick on you because I held this up in front of your vision and of course, this is where your attention is going to go. But how often do we get sucked into the experience that's in front of us, that we lose sight of all the space around it, and the many other experiences that are happening in each moment? This is true with our thoughts.

It's true with our emotions. It's true with physical pains and even just our small individual selves that we can take very seriously or get really focused in on. We can get so sucked into the actual substance of our experience that we often lose sight of the space around it. Have you ever happened or happen to notice this in your own life? You get so sucked into a thought pattern that you can't see any other way to view a situation. Or if you stubbed your toe, all of your attention goes right to that toe that we lose complete touch with any part of the body that isn't in pain.

Of course, part of this is how the brain is wired. It's designed to zoom into experiences, especially potentially painful experiences that we need to change or get rid of. But it can also happen when we don't really need it to be focusing that closely on an experience. So today my invitation to you is to practice zooming in and out of your experience. When you notice yourself really obsessed with something or ruminating about it, or just solely focused on it, what would it be like to take the perspective of standing back and notice what else is in my experience.

What else is true here? As always, this is an ongoing practice. Have some fun with it and be playful. I'll talk to you soon and take care.