Hello and welcome to season four of Mindfulness Plus.

I'm your host Thomas McConkey.

Thank you so much for listening today.

Oh, my friends, here we are at the beginning and end of times.

We were planning on launching season four at the end of April, and I thought, hey, I've got some time on my hands at home why not start recording a little earlier

so here we are I feel a comfort sitting here and just speaking into the mic even though

you're not present present you are very present to me.

And I feel your hearts out there.

I feel the troubledness of humanity right now and also the great promise and the great

resilience of our humanity that somehow somewhere in us we know how to face really

challenging circumstances and transmute these leaden situations into gold. That's my hope here.

And today I want to start first by welcoming new listeners, if you haven't

heard Mindfulness Plus before, maybe you could go back in some earlier seasons. Check out some

episodes. The title, what's with the title? Why the Plus? Well, first of all, it's awesome. That's why mindfulness plus. But also, you know, I have been in practice for a while now at mindfulness, and the more I do it, the more I've come to think about it is just a foundational skill set to human being and once we really

understand the skill set and you know we all have it it's not like only special

people have mindfulness human beings are mindful by nature it's something we

naturally grow into by the grace of life. And if we want to

grow into it a little more willingly, we can practice it deliberately. As we practice this natural,

this innate skill set that we call mindfulness, we can apply it to everything and everybody, every relationship,

every place, every pandemic, it turns out. So mindfulness is the foundational skill set. The plus is what you do with it.

It's when you take it everywhere and you endeavor to become a better human being with it

and serve humanity. Something like that. Ask me next episode. It'll be a new definition, but I like

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