Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus.

I'm your host Thomas Mekonki. Thank you for listening today.

I want to talk a little bit about what I'll call continuous practice.

In a mindfulness practice, we start out maybe doing a few

minutes a day, listening to a recording, a podcast, this, that, maybe after we get some momentum going,

we'll practice for 20 minutes a day on our own, maybe 20 minutes twice a day. If it builds from

there, we may end up doing, you know, a retreat where

we go somewhere for a weekend or we go somewhere for a whole week. The amount of time, the

duration of practice can keep going up and up and up if we continue in the practice.

The issue is if practice is just effortful, if mindfulness were a practice of remembering

to log as many minutes and hours and days a week as we possibly could, I think we'd be

doomed in a lot of ways. Because we're so fallible, of course, we'll forget to practice.

If we were solely in charge of our practice and the success of it, I think we'd be in a lot of trouble.

Luckily, that's not the case.

And I want to offer a natural metaphor here to kind of describe what I see is going on in a

mindfulness practice, especially as we mature in the practice. I'm inspired by bird behavior

and the way that birds save energy by holding their wings extended, kind of scanning the environment,

looking for thermal currents or updrafts. Birds that do a lot of traveling and a lot of flying

would wear themselves out very quickly

if flying meant flapping every time they went airborne.

Birds save tremendous amounts of energy by riding thermal currents around the entire

planet.

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