Hello, my name is Thomas Mekonki, and you are listening to Mindfulness Plus.

I want to talk about something today, an aspect of the practice that is subtle and very important.

And I'll start by way of telling a story. Just before Christmas at the end of 2016, I decided to do a seven-day silent retreat, but instead of going away to a retreat center

and traveling, I decided to do this retreat at my home.

So seven days of silence in my home, sitting long hours in the day, holding silence throughout the week,

cooking meals, getting some good walking in, a little bit of exercise. It was a gorgeous week.

One of the things I focused on in this meditation retreat was

heart opening exercises.

So physically, movements that would help kind of open my heart.

And for those of you not hip to that terminology, it just meant really spreading my chest

out a little bit, really allowing my chest to expand my posture to be upright.

So, you know, I might lay down on a bolster to just let my shoulders hang on either side

to do that.

I was doing some Feldenkris movement,

for those of you who know Feldenkrais. But the point being, I had an intention to just work with my physical posture a little bit. It wasn't crazy. It was really just for maybe a couple minutes a day

was all. I noticed by day five, so if you had it up, this is very minuscule.

Five days, a couple minutes a day, about 10 minutes of some basic exercises, but bringing

a lot of awareness, bringing a lot of intention to this physical movement. And by about day five,

something really struck me. It just felt like my heart was, my chest was wide open, that my heart

was an open nerve. And it was actually an amazing thing. I felt really tender. The world felt really delicate and beautiful to me.

And as I noticed this in the moment, as I reflected on it, I realized that it was really just a one degree shift in posture.

I don't even know that you could tell by looking at

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