Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus.

I'm your host Thomas Mocke. Thank you so much for listening today.

I have had an experience recently that I wanted to share with you here knowing that you will have had similar experiences to me.

And I wanted to make the relationship to mindfulness practice to an awareness,

a meditation practice, more explicit.

It goes back all the way to really my first day practicing meditation.

I've talked about this in previous seasons, previous episodes.

Essentially, right when I started meditating, right when I was introduced to the practice of meditation,

I noticed approximately two things. The one was that this was very, very, very difficult for me. I felt like I was terrible

at it. I felt like my mind was never going to settle down. It really felt like a fool's errand for me

to try and learn meditation. It was so otherworldly, this image of a meditator's mind that stays put when,

you know, they sit themselves on the cushion. And yet, the other thing I noticed was that it felt

so important to me that on a given day, if I did nothing else but really confront myself, I had, when I first started,

it was 30 minutes. I had to be a 30 minute session. I was somehow fixated on that number.

But if I did nothing else but just sit still for 30 minutes a day and try to breathe or work

with a mantra, syllable, repeated, just

anything to really settle my mind down, that that day I thought was very well spent.

It didn't matter what else I did in a 24-hour period if I could just confront myself for those 30

minutes.

That was my life's purpose.

That's how urgent the meditation practice felt to me at that time.

Of course, over time, it got much easier.

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