Hello and welcome to Mindfulness Plus.

I'm your host, Thomas McConkey.

Thank you so much for listening.

But I mean, thank you so much for listening.

We have been recording this podcast for almost three months now, and our audience has steadily grown. The show has become successful. And I'm just thrilled that I get to share this practice with more and more people.

So thank you for downloading us and thank you for sharing us with people you love and care about

and recognize that this practice could bring even greater happiness to them.

It's a pleasure to be here.

So along those lines, we are November 23rd, the day before Thanksgiving. And I want to talk a little bit about my mindfulness

practice in the context of family dinner, because many of us are about to sit down to

a family dinner somewhere in the world and many of us are going to experience some serious chaos

and some seriously challenging emotions as we get into the holiday season.

How can mindfulness help us with this?

Well, I want to share a little bit about my personal story and how this plays out in my life literally every week.

I have set up my life such that every single Sunday is Sunday dinner. Pardon me,

Thanksgiving dinner. Let me explain. So when I was young, about 13 years old, to be exact,

I had a pretty significant falling out with my family. And it was severe enough that I went years without talking to some of my

family members. It was a really hard time for all of us involved. And I lived a lot of my adolescence and

early adulthood somewhat convinced that I was never going

to have a significant relationship with many of my family members. That was a really hard thing

for me. I grew up here in Salt Lake City for the most part, and when I turned 19 years old, or

it just turned 20, I decided that I wanted to get as far away from Utah as was humanly possible.

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