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 a simple but important tip for your meditation practice.

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

Okay, so let's talk meditation and an important tip for your meditation.

One of the things that I see as extremely common for people getting into meditation practice,

even for long-term practitioners that radically gets in the way of their development in the practice,

is the subconscious, often subconscious, but sometimes conscious.

Let's just say the subconscious perspective that there is something getting in the way of your meditation.

So what do I mean by that? Let's say we sit down, we're going to take 10 minutes of dedicated time to practice mindfulness meditation,

and there are sounds in the background, or there is an itch on the face, or there's just a sense of the body not feeling okay today,

or there are a lot of thoughts in the mind, and the mind quickly then goes to these things are going to get in the way of my meditation practice.

These things are not allowing me to be as present. These things are getting in the way of my peace.

And we might not say that outwardly, we might not even think that we're being aware that we're saying that in our mind,

but chances are if you've been never into a meditation practice, you've experienced this to some extent,

just this feeling of like, oh, these things are getting in the way of my practice.

And the reason this can really be dangerous is because it actually causes you to further fracture from your experience.

Instead of moving toward wholeness and integration and a mind that is expansive enough to hold whatever moves through it,

without constantly needing to push or pull or judge, we're actually reinforcing those patterns of conditioning.

And it's actually just keeping us on the normal path of finding happiness that we're used to,

which is just push away the things we don't like and give me more of the things that we do want.

And then our meditation practice is just good because, oh, it's calm, it's quiet, my body feels good, my mind is calm,

sitting in my closet or in my room, and everything is good.

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