Welcome to First This, a short mindfulness practice and message for any time.

I'm Catherine Nikolai. Thanks for coming to sit with me today. I'm glad you're here.

Please find a seat or other position that you can relax into. And check jaw your shoulders and draw a deep breath in

through your nose and out through your mouth again fill from the bottom to the top, and empty top to bottom.

Good.

Now let your breath just be natural.

Let it move through your nostrils if that's possible,

but at its own rhythm and depth.

And start to narrow your focus.

This is like, and some of you might be too young to have a memory of this,

but when you would turn a dial to manually tune in a radio station,

right, it would be all static at the beginning, and you kept turning the dial,

and a bit of music would break through

and eventually a song would become clear.

And I think that even speaks to the level of focus you want to apply.

Because if you keep dialing it in, if you keep tuning, you're actually going to go back to static.

That's trying too hard.

We're looking for the right level of calm attention

and as you tune in there might be moments where you feel like you're driving through

the mountains because the signal just keeps going in and out.

You're not alone.

There can be a lot of interference.

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