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 Muscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about the VAW.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so I'd like to share a poem by Dennis Warren, and it's called The VAW, and it's the title of this episode.

And he says, at some point, he realized he had to make a choice, or his weaknesses and his fears,

would dominate him for the rest of his life. The pain of being aware, of seeing the consequences of not choosing,

had become more painful than continuing to giving in.

So he made a vow, not about the future, but about what he would do now, in this moment, over and over again.

That is called The VAW by Dennis Warren. As always, with the poems I share here, notice how this one lands for you.

The second stands as the one that really stood out to me, the pain of being aware, of seeing the consequences of not choosing,

had become more painful than continuing to giving in. The pain of being aware.

Now, this is one of the things that I actually most appreciate about mindfulness practice.

A lot of times when we think of mindfulness, we tend to focus more on just all the ways that it sensitizes us to the good things in our life.

And some of that just comes with being more present, but it also sensitizes us to all aspects of our life.

And part of that is when we might feel like we're out of alignment, or when we're negotiating away a certain intuition around what we should do.

Or just when we feel like, yeah, I'm avoiding something right now.

We feel that more and more, and the pain of that, it becomes more in our awareness, and it can get louder.

And in that way, mindfulness and meditation and any sort of contemplative practices that get you more connected to your mind and in your body,

they become vehicles for greater alignment because they highlight and amplify the pain of being out of alignment, of not feeling into and connecting to and living in alignment with a certain intuition or sense of yourself and what you should do.

Or when you're acting out of courageous presence versus out of fear, you know, living your life out of fear.

That can show up in a lot of different ways. I mean, it could just be, oh yeah, I'm scared to take this risk right now.

But it could also be, yeah, there's something about this scenario, this relationship or this job that is like, yeah, so so.

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