 Hi, my name is Justin Koma. I've been meditating for about 30 years and teaching for about 20. Whenever I tell people that I teach meditation, the most common reaction I get from people is, oh, meditation, that would be wonderful. I'd love to be able to do that, but I could never do that because my mind's all over the place and I can't sit still. And it always makes me a little sad because it means that people think that meditation is this incredibly difficult thing that you have to sort of sit and your mind has to be in perfect tranquility. And of course you can't do that. Most people can't do that. I can't do that. I don't think the Dalai Lama can do that. So there's this misconception about what meditation is. And what I'd like to do is just to share with you a little bit about what meditation is and to show you how incredibly simple it is. The premise of meditation is simply that your mind is an incredible tool. It's incredibly powerful and wonderful. It does all sorts of incredible things. Intelligence, curiosity, creativity. We have this ability to hold down a job. We can deal with our family relationships. Your mind is amazing doing millions of things. But it's also flawed in a couple of ways. And sometimes it's unhelpful. Sometimes we just get into this cycle of unhelpful thinking whereby we look over things that have happened in the past with lots of regret or we worry endlessly about things in the future over which we have no control. These are unhelpful and they cause us a great deal of misery and suffering. And meditation is this set of practices and exercises that have been developed over thousands of years that help us interrupt some of the negative thinking and help us enhance how our mind is helpful for us. And if I may suggest that while you can spend the rest of your life getting better at it, it's also incredibly simple to learn right now today. So for example, if I can just invite you to notice your breathing right now, just breathe in and breathe out. If you can do that, you can meditate. I promise. That's not quite a meditation, but it's really close and it is that simple. All you have to do is breathe. Now to turn breathing into a meditation, the only thing you have to do is simply to pay attention to it. Just notice as you breathe in. Notice as you breathe out. Here's the thing. Your mind is always focused somewhere. Always. Right now, for example, your mind is somewhere. It may be paying attention to what I'm saying, but you may be wondering, is what I'm saying true? Could you really meditate? There might be doubt. You might be going, Oh, no, I can never do that. Well, you might be excited thinking, Oh, maybe I could do this meditation thing. Or you might be wondering what you're going to have for lunch later. But your mind is always somewhere. And in meditation, all we're doing is we're just choosing to direct it in a very specific place on something that's happening right now. Your breathing. Now there is, of course, a difficulty as well. And the difficulty is that your mind gets very distracted very quickly. But by placing it on the breathing to start with, we start to get better at noticing where it goes. So we're going to do some more videos with some meditation practice. And we're going to do three different meditations. The first one, we're going to build on what we've already done with this breathing meditation, where we're really becoming more familiar with our own minds. But we're also becoming more familiar with what it is like to rest our attention simply in the present moment right now and not be in here. In the second meditation, we're going to use our body, what's known as a body scan, we're going to pay attention to all of these different sensations that are going in your body all the time, from your toes to your fingertips. All over your body, there are these tiny little sensations and we simply pay attention to them. It's an incredibly relaxing meditation. The third meditation, we're going to do something what's known as loving kindness. This is an incredibly beautiful meditation, whereby we build on your natural capacity for kindness, generosity and love. And it's a guided meditation, I'll take you through it step by step, where we cultivate these incredibly powerful and beautiful emotions that you already have. I look forward to seeing you there.