Hello and welcome to Mindfulness Plus.

I'm your host, Thomas McConkey.

Thank you so much for listening today.

So I want to talk a little bit about that voice in your head that tells you you're doing it wrong.

I want to share a life-changing practice with you, which is mindfulness.

And after teaching mindfulness to thousands of students, what I can tell you is that it's a lot of people.

It's too many people who actually experience profound benefits from the practice, but over time, they end up washing out.

They don't stick with the practice.

There are a lot of reasons why this happens, but I want to share a personal reason with you in the hopes that it might resonate with

your own experience. So I was at a meditation retreat years ago, and this particular retreat happened to be 10 days long and I

noticed about five or six days in that I became consumed by a voice inside of my head, this kind of

drill sergeant barking at me, telling me that I was doing

the meditation wrong, that if I were doing it right, I would be more comfortable, I would be

more relaxed, I would be happier. And given how unhappy and how uncomfortable I was as I was listening to that voice, it started to make a lot of sense.

This voice on the inside of my head started to make a lot of sense.

I thought, gosh, he certainly has a point.

I'm pretty miserable.

I'm seven days in.

I'm supposed to be blest out,

enlightened, levitating with the ascended masters beyond space and time. But instead, I'm just suffering. My back hurts. My knees are stabbing. My mind is racing. I want a good proper meal and I want to

stop waking up at 4 a.m. to meditate. So that's the situation I'm in. But I stick it out. I was

fortunate. Something in me just sat through it.

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