Hello and welcome back to practicing human the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host Corey Muscarra and in today's episode we're going to talk about the counterintuitive approach to managing

stress and anxiety, as well as any other form of discomfort.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells. D' So a common question I get from folks is, you know, Cori, I'm coming here to manage stress. I'm coming to the meditation practice to reduce

anxiety, to reduce pain, discomfort, overwhelm. But then we go in into meditation and you say be with the moment as it is or things like

trying to change your anxiety will often lead to more anxiety.

And so this can be a hard thing to wrap our heads around

because we do come to these practices and you're probably even

listening to this podcast because you have some idea of what you want to get out of it and

usually that is associated with a particular feeling tone that feels better than you do right now and so we have that dangling carrot in front us, the idea of what we're moving toward.

And our current experience often feels like the enemy to that, something that we need to

push, fix, get away from, or just overcome. And it's still

interesting to me that that is such a common prescription or refrain in many

personal development circles and I'm not even talking about just the old school

ones but like many modern ones even with people I

respect will say things like that inner voice in your mind is the enemy or you

have to overcome this adversary in your mind or some part of you that

it's just like we is an obstacle is the enemy the thing that needs to be conquered.

And I won't dismiss this entirely because these ideas

wouldn't continue if they had no utility.

So they're effective to an extent, but typically as a long-term

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