Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus. I am your host Thomas McConkey. Thanks so much for listening today. Little baby Phoenix is 12 days old. I am

profoundly sleep deprived and drawing on all of my meditation training to somehow

function without sleep day to day. I'm feeling pretty good.

I'm definitely happy to be sharing the practice with you right now.

So again, thanks for bringing your attention, your life energy,

and spending time with this practice.

It's my experience that your practice, every drop of practice, is a profound

offering to the world. I'm going to talk about babies in this episode, and I know what you're

thinking. Just because Thomas is a first time dad, he's going to start talking about babies nonstop on

Mindfulness Plus, and I'm going to have to find a new home for my mindfulness practice.

Fear not. That's not my plan, but I couldn't help it today because there's a really great

application of mindfulness practice that involves not babies so much as our own baby nature.

What do I mean by that?

Not everybody realizes that babies, in a sense, aren't born the day they're born.

Babies leave the womb on the day they're born. Babies leave the womb on the day we say they're born conventionally. But psychologically, a baby isn't born into personhood.

A baby doesn't hatch into an identity separate from the environment until some research

has it between four and nine months. So this technical term hatching, it refers to, we could say,

the real birth of the human child.

Like when the baby, not differentiates from the mother physically coming out of the womb,

but when the baby differentiates from the cosmic flow of all of creation and realizes that he, she, they actually are somehow separate

and unique from the environment.

This is really a profound moment.

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