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

I want to start off by thanking everybody for listening.

It's been a few weeks since I've been back in the swing of season five, and I feel more buoyant.

I feel more joy. I pay attention to my life and the world in different ways.

When I'm recording this podcast, actually, I've come to think of it.

I hope this doesn't debase the podcast, but I've started to think about it as a bit of a

mindfulness journal so that when I'm in season, I'm just attending to the world in a different

way and like reflecting on the way the practice shows up

and how a mindfulness practice can change our quality of life

by the way we pay attention to our lives.

So it benefits me tremendously to get to share the content with you.

And if you weren't listening, there would be no podcast to speak of.

So thank you to the listeners.

Thank you to Skylight for generously funding season five and letting me do something I love very much.

What I want to talk about today is extraordinary happiness.

And I say extraordinary to make a distinction between extraordinary and

ordinary happiness. And I also, to add one more layer of texture, I want to talk about

extraordinary happiness in the context of Advent, because we are recording today. It is an unnervingly warm December day in Salt Lake City, Utah.

I wonder what Decembers will be like in a hundred years from now in Utah. They seem awfully warm right now.

At any rate, it's December and it's Advent. For you Christians out there,

you know that Advent is on the Christian liturgical calendar, and the word itself comes from the Latin

Adventus, meaning a coming or arrival, referring to the arrival of the Christ child in the Christian tradition, but it also points to the

...