Welcome to Day 4 and we'll be doing some mixture of relational exercises and continuing with our mindfulness work.

So just to deepen some of the ideas that were presented last night. Oh yes that's better.

So, when we engage in what could be called external mindfulness, what we're doing is we're taking the same receptive, inquisitive,

body-aware mind, and now we're turning it outwards towards other people.

So much in the same way that in mindfulness what we're doing is we're shifting the focus of attention away from our fixation on thoughts and stories and narratives and living in the ongoing inner chatter that narrates life and in mindfulness what we do is we deepen into body awareness into feeling awareness and emotion awareness and we develop a much more somatic connection.

Awareness is less than about living up here

and narrating and thinking about how the present moment fits into a story

leading us from earlier life to the future.

And instead, when we deepen into the body

and we connect with body sensations and emotions and we we reconnect with the the breath and the

feelings of the posture.

What we're doing is essentially disconnecting from the sort of the reducing of the present moment into something that we're just getting through

to get from one place to another and we're deepening into all of the sensations that are occurring in the present

and sort of reconnecting with the complexity and the

the wonder of not only the body that's keeping us alive but all the sensations that are available.

So when we turn this awareness outwards we're doing the same thing.

We're not just fixating on the words that people

say, we're actually deepening into what are, what is occurring in their body language?

What are they expressing via feelings?

Where in essence

deepening enriching the way we take in other people.

In our culture we tend to, if anything, we've gone in the opposite direction.

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