Hello, my friends. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you all for all of the really kind and generous and warm feedback on the last solo episode and just trying something out a little different year and there on the podcast.

I really do appreciate all of that and also rating the show on iTunes and you know, leaving reviews in the comments. I really appreciate that. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Today on the show, we're going to talk about mental clarity.

Now, mental clarity is an interesting one because people have a lot of different ideas about what that means.

Typically, they think mental clarity means that your mind is literally empty.

As you're going through life, you just have no thoughts whatsoever and you're sort of like this telescope moving through space and time.

And that's not the case because by nature, our minds always have thoughts.

There are thought machines in the same way that our hearts is always beating. Our mind is always thinking.

And you can't exactly stop your heart from beating in the same way that you can't stop your mind from thinking.

And so the idea that we should be aiming to have a clear, empty mind with no thoughts at all can be a destructive one because it makes people feel guilty and makes them feel like they're failing, like they're not accomplishing some task, which they really don't understand what the task is in the first place.

And what's really interesting about that is that the amount of people that have told me, I tried to meditate, I've tried to build stillness into my life so that I have time to decompress and to clear my mind.

And every time I do it, all I become aware of is this intense circus of thoughts in my mind, like it's just on overdrive.

And they typically think like, well, because I have that sensation, I suppose I'm just one of those people that is not going to have a clear mind or be able to achieve some type of mental clarity.

The fascinating thing about that is in those moments and what I always tell those people is that by recognizing that your mind is busy, you're actually succeeding at gaining mental clarity.

Because all of that time that you were going through life and you had no awareness pointed on the activity in your mind and your arising thoughts, that was whenever you didn't have mental clarity.

The moment that you actually worked at it, paused and became self-aware of the arising thoughts and passing notations in your mind, that's a huge success.

But people see that as a type of failure or they turn it into some type of self-judgment.

Because when they see the busyness, it is startling and intimidating.

Whenever really, it's just like having a garden in your backyard and never tending it.

Obviously, it's going to become overgrown and that's how the unexamined mind is.

That's why I put the line in my book, when if you notice that you're living mindlessly, you're actually succeeding at living mindfully.

That's because whenever you recognize some type of behavior that you're doing that isn't aligned with what you want, the fact that you're recognizing that is a huge win.

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