 Hello and welcome to day 74 of the mindfulness challenge. Hope you're doing well today. You've had a lovely weekend. It's the first of June here, so happy first day. Pinch, punch the first day of the month, no returns. Today what we're gonna be talking about in terms of mindfulness is we're gonna go back and look at stress, okay? And relieving some of the stress and we get stressed every day, but sometimes we're not even aware that our bodies are becoming stressed. And what I want us to do is I want us to really, through this session, think about where it manifests and how we can deal with it. And it really is a session really where you're focusing on how and where your sort of initially your low levels of stress are. And the human body, we talked about this a few times really, and we haven't really come up with any stats, but the stats I want to say today is this, is that each human, each one of us, has how many thoughts in a day be interesting for you to guess. Have a guess, give me the answer. You're talking to me now, I can't hear you, but thank you for the answer anyway. Were you close to 5,000? Do you think it's more or less? It's more. What about 10,000, more or less? 20? 30? Surely no more than 40,000 thoughts a day. Yeah, 50,000 thoughts a day. Now you can see why we have so many thoughts, how we get ourselves into so much trouble. So instead of these thoughts overtaking your life and being part of something that really doesn't exist, the realization that these thoughts can simply come and go as very, very powerful. And if we can step back from these thoughts, as we said, and we can observe them better and see them for what they are, which is just passing moments of thinking. Think about that. Your thoughts in general are just passing moments of thinking. And attaching too much emotion to one stressful thought can completely disrupt our day and on occasions, our entire lives. So today what we're gonna do is we're gonna step away now from our thoughts and worries by becoming aware of our body. And I want you just to close your eyes and I'm gonna bring a picture up and we're gonna just sit in our chairs again, like we always do. But the intentions and the meditations are slightly different. This time I wanna feel, I want you to feel how the air around you, feel the air, push your awareness out. Feel the air around you, where it hugs the shape of your body. And notice how you can willingly activate all of your senses. You can hear all the sounds around you, if you like. You can hear your own breath. And when you breathe a little deeper, can you smell anything? Can you even imagine you smell something? Can your mind can create the thought of it for you? Can you imagine the smell of a vanilla? Can you remember how that vanilla smells? Can you imagine the smell of lavender? And can you remember how that smells? Now I want you to notice your fingertips and feel what they're touching right now and become aware then of your feet. And notice how the soles of your feet right now are touching the floor. And just become aware of your entire body right now. And becoming aware of your body through focusing takes out your thoughts. So use this technique when worry or stress comes to mind. And we react to worry because we believe that worry is real. And did you know that 99% or more of our worries don't end up happening? They are just thoughts passing through. And we think of worry as bad, but actually worries are very important. They're part of our lives. Without worry you can't make bad decisions. Without worry you would walk off a cliff without taking precaution. Our brain creates worry to keep us on guard and alert. But some of this worry carries us away and takes over us putting stress in full control of our mind and our body. And as we sit here just breathing we truly understand that statement. And instead of letting doubts push us around and drain us we can learn to use the worry to our advantage. And easiness can either become our greatest strength or our biggest weakness. So let's gain control over our fears that causes stress. Instead of reacting to it we will learn and become stronger from each time it arises. And to do this we need to identify where this emotion is located and bring awareness to it. Whenever it rises purposefully creating space between it. So as we sit in this beautiful comfortable position just following our breath and my voice we just need to sit here in a very comfortable position making sure that your spine is straight and that you are very comfortable and just take a few deep breaths to relax even more. And bring into mind a good emotion like excitement. Notice in your body where you feel changes happening kind of like mapping it. Let's just bring awareness that you've won a large sum of money and that excitement, that good emotion. Where is it coming from? And then remember a time when you're really excited about something. Could be anything no matter how big or small just vividly remember how it felt. Where did you feel it in that body? And how did you move? What changes did you notice? Find out where exactly this feeling of excitement is located. Was it in your stomach or in your chest? Maybe it moves around and doesn't stay in one place but get familiar with this feeling. You can imagine the way you're feeling in your body at any time by remembering an experience or excitement or joy and your body creates this feeling as if it's happening right now and use this knowledge of how excitement makes your body feel and how easy it is to bring you back to that feeling. Now I want you to create a worrisome feeling consciously, no need to be afraid or to avoid this feeling. It's a human emotion that happens. Avoiding it is what's creating discomfort and additional stress. So I want you now to bring to your mind a time when you felt worried, some moment in life when stressed up full control of you and locate where this emotion's coming from. Where do you feel this? And just sit with it for a moment. Right now you are in complete control. Being aware of the feeling right now is what creates the space that you need. And just see this emotion as a simple sensation in your body and it has no power in itself. It lingers sometimes in one place or it might move around. Now with this feeling of stress, I want you to bring back that feeling of excitement and notice how we can change the way we feel when we focus on different feelings. And as vividly as possible, bring that feeling of excitement into your body. Remember when you were absolutely full of thrill and little matted to accept this moment and this joy. Remember how it made you so excited that you couldn't stay still and the strong energy was flowing all through your body. Now notice all the different sensations in your body. Notice any changes happening. Put your awareness within to see exactly what's happening. And you probably forgot about the stress and feel no trace of the worry-ness sensation we created a few moments ago. Or maybe can we still feel it? But you notice that's it, just there. It may even feel a little pleasant or strange but it's not in control of you. See it for what it is. An emotion that's here to protect and care about you. You can see there is no need to escape it. This worrisome thought, there's no need to get stressed about it. And this is the space of peace. And I want you to keep practicing this space at all times during your day, especially when you become worried. And when you become worried, just remember of time of happiness or passion or any other positive emotion and let it rise in your body and stress can leave as easily as it comes. It could stay for a short time. It could stay for a long time. And in the main, it's up to you and how you react to it. So anytime you're faced with worries, remember these techniques and implement them. So you can go about your day without the burden of stress. When you feel stressed, bring to mind a moment of love and excitement, of happiness, of joy. And focus on that and watch the stress and strains dissipate. Everything passes, good and bad. Your thoughts are there, but they're not real. Do not make thoughts your master or allow stress to be your ball and chain. Stress is an emotion that we can just think of something else and move on as we have another stress thought. We know that our mind will have another 49,999 thoughts today, so let's make those thoughts good thoughts, happy thoughts by understanding that we are in control of our thoughts, not our thoughts in control of us. Take a deep breath in. When you're ready, just come back into the room. It's a nice meditation, isn't it? It's one of those ones where you think a lot about stress, we all get stressed. Come on, you know, the Dalai Lama probably gets stressed, maybe he doesn't. I don't know, I don't know him personally, to be honest. But you know, we all get stressed and it's that ability to be able to work with it and not allow it to consumers, allow our thoughts consumers eat away at us and build those levels of stress. So I hope today has been a good day for you. As always, I want you to put your hand on your heart and say, good morning, Julian, I love you. Good morning, Julian, I love you. And just for the record, we started this in March and I meditate every day, but I haven't used this thing for a very long time. This is a muse to headphone, not headphone, a band that measures your brainwave activity. And every day I've been doing meditation, but importantly, every day I've been reciting meditation and talking about mindfulness now for 74 days. And I put this on today and out of 10 minutes, I had one second of activity. I had over 75% calm, which is very, very high because you see, by me helping you to help yourselves have helped myself as well. So I feel more calm, more relaxed, more understanding. And that's because of you and your dedication of watching me. So thank you from the bottom of my heart. Be loving, give love. Muse to, highly recommend them. Look after yourself, take care, bye-bye.