Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus.

I'm your host Thomas Mekonki.

Thanks so much for listening today. I am thrilled to be back in season five,

if I didn't say that often enough in the last couple of episodes, I want to say it again.

It's just great to be recording again and sharing a practice with you all that continues

to be really transformative and life-changing for me. I talked about

the plus and mindfulness plus back in season one, but I want to pick it up again. I think there's

some new listeners, and even if you're not a new listener, you might have forgotten about that

conversation. I want to just pick it back up and add a couple new layers.

Maybe I have a few new tricks up my sleeve over the last five years.

Picked a little something up and insight here or there.

So I want to talk about why mindfulness plus.

So mindfulness first, it's this practice that's really proliferating in the Western world.

More sectors of society are interested in it,

politics, education, medicine, everywhere. It's a practice that dates back to early Buddhism,

so we could take it back. Some people associate mindfulness with the innovation of Buddhism where it actually differentiated from Hinduism, and this is about 2,500 years ago. So it goes back

at least that far. The plus is significant to me. So mindfulness is a practice, we could think of as a set of attentional skills we can use

to sharpen the mind, deepen our concentration, change the way we pay attention to moment-to-moment

experience.

And that's significant in and of itself. And if we look at the

written record in civilization, there's evidence that human beings have been doing meditative

practices for many thousands of years. So I always think it's interesting. When human beings have

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