Welcome to episode 2978 of your daily meditation podcast. I'm Mary Mechley and I

welcome you to day six of the series we're exploring this week. This week the

theme is do less better and we're following along with the insight and wisdom

from Marcus Aurelius who is a famous stoic philosopher as well as a former

emperor of Rome. In fact he's considered to be one of the last great emperors of

Rome before it crumbled and he faced so many challenges during his reign

including poor health. A pandemic can you imagine he dealt with a pandemic we just came out of one

plagues. He fought the infamous Germanic tribes at the northern border of Italy so he experienced a

lot of external threats but he also experienced internal threats with conspiracies and uprisings.

The pandemic and the plague had weakened the country so much that it didn't have quite

enough money to fund these battles to keep foreign invaders out of Italy and also to manage the

inner threats coming right from within Rome of people who wanted to overthrow him during his

reign. So this was a man who had so much happening, so many challenges yet he wrote this beautiful

book of meditations and I want to share with you a quote from the book as I've been doing each day

and you can just imagine what kind of state he must have been in but then how he was able to

go inward to sit in stillness to do less and do it better because he had so much focus he was able to

reflect on his life and this made him such a great leader so this is one of his quotes he says

dwell on the beauty of life, watch the stars and see yourself running with them.

So as you settle yourself down and get ready to meditate today, I invite you to think about

your mindfulness quest. This week your challenge is to give yourself a one minute mindfulness break

and I hope you've been doing that and I wonder if you could continue doing this ongoing.

You will be surprised by how much more effective you are and like Marcus Aurelius I believe that

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