Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus. I'm your host Thomas McConkey. Thank you so much for listening today.

The theme of practice for this episode is a little something I call building heaven.

What does that mean?

Well, something I like to do, I found this to be really helpful in teaching in general, but in teaching mindfulness specifically.

I like a good metaphor.

I like a good analogy.

And I like to relate it back to something we're doing in the practice.

And again, I don't think we can say it enough.

What are we doing in the practice?

What is a mindfulness practice?

Mindfulness practice is paying attention in a particular way.

We're doing it with intention.

We're holding our awareness at a higher pitch, a higher octave.

And when we do this, life presents itself to us differently. We notice possibilities we wouldn't have

noticed before. Things work better. That's an understatement, but it's brief, it's concise.

Things work better when we're mindful.

So what is this about building heaven?

So I was talking to a friend who lives in Europe.

And we were talking about, I don't even remember what we were talking about.

But he brought up this kind of fascinating point that back in the day, we were talking like medieval Europe,

that you could be born in a town in medieval Europe where the local bishop had decided to build a cathedral. Let's take an iconic, well-known cathedral here. Let's talk about the Cathedral

of Notre Dame in Paris. So the cornerstone, I think they made the decision to build this

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