 All right. All right, we are recording. All right, welcome everyone to the third session of our mindfulness practice led by trader Bianca. So I don't have a lot to say before I turn it over to you Bianca, except I re-listened to our last session and kind of went through the breath work, kind of a little session that you did. And actually that was Monday after the market closed. I did that again and it was great. So I love the aspect of this where we can go back and kind of listen again and kind of go through the same kind of guided session that you provided. So good stuff. Yeah, and we'll do something a little bit different today, but similar, same sort of path. But before we get started, I wanted to talk about something that I came across called this podcast I came across called Alpha Mind. I don't know if you have heard of it. I have, I've listened to it before, yep. Yeah, and there are two guys in the trading world, I think they both combined have like 70 years of experience of being in the financial world as floor traders and now they do a lot of coaching of traders and one thing that they mentioned is that there seems to be this misunderstanding of what mindfulness is because people seem to think that it's all like only for people who do yoga and it's all, it's just for housewives and things like that. And daily, I've listened to so many podcasts but it turns out that mindfulness practices are so commonplace now in the military, in the Fortune 500 companies, I mean everywhere. Anywhere there's like where there's a high performance, high stress environment. Somebody has instituted some kind of mindfulness practice especially also with professional athletes because it turns out it really significantly changes their performance when they have this kind of mindfulness practice but they call it, they actually call it mind fitness training. And I really like that term because it takes that sort of yoga connotation away from it a little bit and that sort of like, you know, it's just for women kind of connotation. And it's, and just like in fitness, you start small and you start with, you know, easy things as you build that muscle and then you continue on to more difficult things. So I just wanted to mention that. If anybody wanted to listen to that, it's a great podcast, Alpha Mind and there's a ton of interesting people that are being interviewed and including Tom Hougard and a lot of authors of certain books and interesting stuff. So with that said, I wanted to talk a little bit about as a culture, we are in this mode of doing, right? We're always doing, we're always making an effort. We're always asked to be alert. There's always, there's a definitive focus on outcome. We're always thinking and everything has complexity to it, right? So we're in this mode of having to accomplish something. And so when we start to bring that mode to mindfulness and to this kind of practice, it kind of clashes because we're really in the mindfulness practice, we're asked to be in a being mode, which is a mode of non-doing, no effort. It's, we're just asked to be in a safe space. It focuses on process and on sensation and on experiences. So it's kind of the opposite of being in this doing mode and while doing mode is extremely useful and practical in our everyday life, it becomes difficult to switch into this being mode for mindfulness when you think that doing mode is the only mode you have or is the only way to be. So this kind of practice helps us explore these aspects of being mode and find different experiences and find different ways of coping and dealing with things. And obviously a good way of engaging with this being mode rather than the doing mode is by how we start, usually the practices, by using some kind of breath work to turn ourselves inward and start being with ourselves. And that in and of itself can be very, very difficult because when you start to do that and you start to turn yourself inward, you can experience all kinds of emotions and all kinds of thoughts might come up that can be extremely uncomfortable and the initial reaction might be to try to push all of that away and just escape from it and let your mind just go wander and just not. But the idea is to train our minds to become aware of the thoughts and the emotions and to allow them to be with them and to let them exist without judging them. So that's something we're gonna practice a little bit today in our guided part of the session. So I don't know if anybody at this point has any questions. Are there any questions? If anyone has any questions, feel free to type in the chat or if you wanna jump on the mic, just let me know in the chat first and we'll, you can unmute and talk as well but while we're waiting to see if anybody does, I just wanted to touch on one thing you said Bianca and that is about people using mind fitness or mindfulness practices in all the highest level of performance. It depends I guess kind of who you relate to or what you wanna achieve, whether it's in trading or anything else in your life but I played sports in high school and so I always kind of relate to professional athletes when it comes to kind of seeing what they can do above and beyond and I've done a lot of, I've listened to a lot of podcasts, read a lot of books, autobiographies on super high performance athletes, you're Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Tom Brady's, those kinds of people and I don't remember ever digging deep into the kind of the lifestyle and the practices of somebody like that who didn't implement some type, who didn't have some type of mindfulness coach or some type of mindfulness practice and so it just goes to show you that if you want to achieve something at the highest level then it's not only just kind of a nice to have kind of thing but I think it's a critical thing to have and so for me, when I'm looking at my trading and I'm constantly trying to get better and I wanna think of myself as a high performance athlete except in trading, I just think that some of these practices that you're talking about and some of these exercises that you're going through, I think they're critical so I just wanted to throw that out there and whether you relate to athletes or artists or whatever it might be, I think just doing a little research and understanding what it actually takes that you don't see on the surface, if you're into music or singing and you see your favorite artist out there doing concerts or whatever, it just kind of looks fun and they're just kind of, you might just think, oh, it just comes easy to them. Well, it's not that way. I mean, if you wanna push yourself to become an elite person at whatever it is that you wanna do then I think really digging into this mindfulness stuff is such a critical part of that so I just wanted to share that the way that I think about it in relation to what I'm doing as well as other high level performance type people. Yeah, and I totally agree with you. It's really on every high performance field, you'll find this kind of stuff and I think the most measured is really amongst athletes because the results are so measurable and they've done incredible studies with athletes who implement these kind of practices and yeah, they really have incredibly increased performance and so you might, like how does this relate to trading? Like we're not running sprints or doing anything like that but our minds might be running some sprints sometimes but I think for traders, for the most part, where it is beneficial is that you start to you start to become aware or more aware of when things start to go off the rails for you emotionally. When you start to become aware of these thoughts and emotions that you might have that can start to accumulate during the day and they accumulate and accumulate and at one point they blow up and they start to take control of you and the result might be revenge trading, replacing trades that you didn't really intend or that don't make any sense but you can't help yourself and there's all kinds of aspects making mistakes that you normally wouldn't make. There's so many different things that can go wrong as you know in trading when our minds start to go haywire and our emotions start to take over and we lose control in that way. So the mindfulness helps us become cognizant of the thought processes that we have and the emotions that we have. It's sort of like a metacognition where we think about our thinking. So we are more aware of our thoughts and therefore we can recognize the signals of when things start to go wrong and that's when you can implement the techniques like breathing, body scans, a short meditation, anything like that to bring yourself back to center and not let those emotions take over. So I think that's always a little like an elusive concept. When somebody is a really good trader, they go, yeah, why do I need this? I make money, I'm really good at this. But I think there's always room for improvement in any field, anywhere. So yeah. So if there are no questions, I would say we start with the breath, the breath work that I have planned for today. You can either lie down or you can sit up. Either way, we'll be fine today. And the breath that we'll be doing today is called the three-part breath. And it's a little unusual. It might take a little getting used to, but when you're not usually thinking about your breath, it all might feel a little new. But just stick with it and see what you get from it and so we're going to sit comfortably or lie down wherever you are. And we're going to place the right hand on the stomach, covering about where the navel is. And your left hand is on your chest, sort of on your sternum. And you're gonna close your eyes. If you feel comfortable, close your, also leave your eyes open if that's more comfortable. And we're just going to be here for a minute and observe the breath, breathing normally in and out through the nose. The tongue should be resting on the upper palate between the teeth. And think of the breath as a circular movement so there's no stopping point or starting point in and out through the nose. The top of the head is moving upwards. Your spine is nice and long. And you're slowly coming into your body, noticing any areas of tension, any holding. Just gently breathe into those areas and let them release. This is called the three-part breath because we're going to be breathing into three different parts of our lungs. We're gonna be breathing into the lower belly and that is basically diaphragmatic breathing. So on the next inhalation, just let your belly really expand into your hand and as you exhale, contract your abdominal muscles and draw your belly towards your spine. By drawing in the abdominal muscles, we get as much air out of the lungs as possible. Next, we're going to add thoracic breathing and as we're breathing in, our abdomen expands and then we're gonna let the air expand into the rib cage, the thoracic region. And as you're exhaling through the nose, squeeze your rib cage and then let the belly contract and your lungs completely. And in the third step, we add clavicle breathing where you breathe when you're on your inhale, you start with the inhale in the belly, let the air travel up to your rib cage and then all the way up into the chest to just below the clavicles. So that way we're filling the entire lung capacity. And as you're exhaling, you're going to reverse so you're exhaling first from the top then contract your rib cage back in and contract your abdominal muscles. You can use your hands to get the sensation of expansion in your belly and your chest. Slowly bring yourself back to normal breathing. We're going to work on a guided meditation today or a guided practice involving rain. And rain is an acronym that stands for recognize, allow, investigate and nerve. And it's especially helpful with difficult emotions or thoughts as we might have sometimes during the day when we're trading and we're making decisions and we start to judge ourselves and we start to become unkind to ourselves and we start to have that negative self-talk. So you can stay in the pen that you're writing right now, you can release your hands. Just for a moment, I invite you to close your eyes again and notice any sensation sets you have in the body or what might be occurring in your mind. Simply observe without any attachment, without any judgment. For a moment, remember a difficult or particularly difficult experience or emotion that you had recently and just recognize that emotion. Recognize any thoughts that are coming up, any sensations that are caused in the body. For example, clenching of the teeth or any tensing of muscles and become aware of a critical inner voice that might have accompanied that emotion. So at this stage, we're simply working on recognizing that emotion or experience and acknowledging the presence of the difficulty in trying to observe the various effects it might have had on our bodies without judgment. So the next step in rain is the step of allowance. Our default mode with difficult emotions or unpleasant experiences is to observe get rid of them in our minds and just suppress them which is run away from them in some way. But instead of doing that, this time, we're gonna allow that emotion to be fully present in you. Simply acknowledge its existence and you might think of a phrase like, well, this is what it is right now. It is what it is and just accept the presence of that particular emotion. And if your mind starts to wander and trying to get away from this painful experience or emotion, simply bring it back gently with kindness and acceptance without judgment. Now that you have recognized the emotion and allowed it to be present within you without judgment, the next step is to investigate. So we become curious. You might ask yourself where in your body you feel vulnerable when you're experiencing this emotion. You might ask yourself how this emotion serves you. And you might ask yourself if you believe you can be free from this turmoil or pain that is caused. And for the final step, the final few minutes, we start nourishing ourselves with self-compassion. You can do that by offering some phrases of compassion to yourself, whatever that might be, and offer an open heart to your body. The difficulties and the both experiences or emotions you might have in the practice of this awareness of these emotions and offering compassion to ourselves and kindness tends to painful experiences rather than denying them. Allows them to exist without suppressing them. And slowly open your eyes, bring yourselves back. Anyone wants to share, that would be great. Very relaxed is my state of being. That's good. This particular aspect of being with our difficult emotions and thoughts can be a little challenging initially because naturally we want to just push them away and just react, that's like, we've all been there, we all know what that feels like, right? It takes you over. And so this really allows us to let ourselves have these emotions because we are human beings, we are going to have emotions, we are going to have thoughts. The idea of mindfulness is not to, or mindful mind fitness, whatever we want to call it is not to suppress everything we're feeling. It's the opposite. It's a way of becoming aware of what you're feeling and thinking and being fine with it and not letting it run wild with you. So that's all I got for today. Yeah, and for me it's two things. So yeah, what you said, accepting how you feel and being aware of it, but then, and we talked a little bit about this last time at the other part is just, I found myself, I don't know how many times during that session right there, just mind wandering off and thinking about things completely different than what I was focusing on and then, and even I'm sitting down, so I felt my head getting really heavy and I was dropping and then realizing I was thinking about something else and just bringing it back to what we were supposed to be doing. And that's awareness right there. The awareness that you drifted off and thinking about something else and were able to bring yourself back. That's awareness right there. That's a whole purpose of this, to cultivate that and the spaces between the moments where your mind wanders off and you realizing it are going to become shorter and shorter and shorter as your practices. It's like lifting weights and starting off with, you know, a couple of pounds and then all of a sudden you go, oh wow, I can do more. And then you do more and then you keep progressing. It's the same, it goes the same way here. It's you start off with big gaps where your mind just goes off on a total tangent and it takes you like forever to realize that you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing and then you bring yourself back and then those moments get shorter and shorter. And it's pretty awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Are there any questions from anyone? Doesn't look like it. Okay. Well thank you Bianca, that was great. Welcome. And yeah, you can always go back to the recording and, you know, do that again. You know, this was a nice, this was, I mean, we started off short in the first, you know, the first practice and then we got a little bit longer last time. And this time we're, I think we're proud at a good 15 minutes. That's really good, it's not bad. So, you know, we're progressing. Yeah, good stuff. Yeah. Yeah, and for those wondering the replays will be in the mindfulness practice channel. I've started a separate thread. So if you click on the mindfulness practice channel, you can either hover over it and the thread pops up where you can click on the mindfulness practice channel and up here is the thread. So you can click on that and that's where the replays will be. So you can go back and listen to them there. Awesome. All right, thanks Bianca. Thanks everybody. Thanks for talking to you soon. Take care. Bye bye. Bye.