 Hello and welcome to day 57 of the mindfulness challenge. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. Thank you very much for watching this video today. Today is all about recognising what you need. Hello and welcome to day 57. Today we're going to talk about how when you begin to truly tune into your mindfulness, your mind, your body and you start to really cultivate and experience mindfulness, you may also start to notice some difficulties and struggles and I talk about this in one of my courses when I talk about the waking up and then the cleaning up and then the ascending up or the growing up and the way in which you find that some of these things start to the difficulties and struggles and shadows that that you've pushed away for all these years, you may start to feel things bubbling under the surface, it's how you deal with it. But importantly as well is recognising in your life what you actually need. I had a conversation in January of this year with a very good friend of mine, I went to his house in Manchester and wishes North England, Northwest England and he's a very successful and wealthy man and we were talking about helping and how we were going to, you know, I was talking about how I was giving all of my businesses up and investing solely into helping people through spirituality and spiritualism and I was sort of talking to him about his life and where he is and he said, yeah, but the thing is, you know, I need this and I need that and I need this and I need that. I said, no, no, no, no. What you need and what you want. You see, what you want isn't sometimes actually what you need and I think if we look at this now at the moment in time whereby there's a lot of things going on in our lives which you've really stripped everything back. So, you know, the ability not to go out, the ability financially, the ability, the ability really gets us to start to understand truly what we need in comparison to what we want. And I know for one, I've scaled everything back in my life. I was going to anyway, but it's certainly been amplified by the coronavirus outbreak and I truly understand now what I need and I'm very structured person. So I've created my Excel spreadsheet and I know my finances and income in and outgoing and what I can invest here and what I can do there and all of these different bits and pieces and I understand truly now what I need and what I want and my friend phoned me up about two weeks into the virus and he said, do you remember that conversation we were having? I said, yeah. He said, I now know what I need and I knew that actually what I wanted, I didn't need and understanding what you truly need can allow you to lower some of those expectations, cut some of that demand and self, self perpetuating drive and ambition and beating yourself when you realise you don't get to that position and you know, if you're not successful, all of those self doubts and and you know, really sort of having a go at yourself about about the things that you should have done and why are you this and why are you that and just scale it all back to, you know, basics. What do you need and what you want? What do you need? So today we're going to do a meditation talking about recognising what you need and and this for me is an exercise where we need to concentrate for a moment and as we've done for the last 56 times, just going inside yourself and look at what your needs at this given moment are and and just be able to be in that body and sitting and listening and waiting for your awareness and breathing through your awareness. So you really have checked in. So I'm going to put a picture up and we're going to start the meditation. So I want you to sit up right as much as you can and and just get comfortable in the chair and gently just close your eyes and for this this practice really is helpful for us to start with a few moments of concentration and and truly settle in. So I want you to just pick a location in your body where you can feel your body breathing. So you're just breathing in and you're just breathing out and tune into the sensations of that breath for a couple of moments. Just focusing in, breathing and breathing out and if anything comes up or comes in, you know what to do. You're just going to see it. You're going to hold it with loving kindness. You're going to accept it and you're just going to breathe through it and watch it dissolve and come back to your breath. It's important that we don't get attached to that story and that we come back to our breath. Just breathing in and breathing out. Now as we're doing this now, I just want you to bring to mind a recent situation that you found difficult or painful but again without falling too far into that story, acknowledge how this experience feels in the present moment and with that memory and experience present in your conscious mind ask yourself what you needed in that moment. Focus on general emotion needs like compassion, understanding and insight and with this difficulty what would have helped you and when a need pops up say to yourself I needed whatever that was for that situation and continue to tune in to your other needs really pause in to acknowledge each one. So just do that. Bring in to your general emotional needs like compassion, understanding and insight with a memory or an experience that was difficult for you and ask yourself what you needed in that moment and continue to tune in to other needs really pausing to acknowledge each one of them and just do that now for a few moments and now turn your awareness to your experience in the present and refraining from stories and goals. Ask yourself what you need right now and let go of thoughts about getting stuff done, completing tasks or even please and others. Focus on your deeper needs of self-care, patience or whatever is true for you in this moment. Reflect on your own capacity to meet your needs. Can you do something to meet these needs right now? Are these needs you have not within your power to fulfil and offer yourself self-care, compassion and patience at this time but just sit there and breathe and just say what do I need today to allow me to grow and move forward breathing in and breathing out and understand this very simple exercise is something that you can tune into every day to be able to check in with your body and just ask what do I need today? What do I need today to get me through what is happening in front of me breathing in and breathing out and when you're ready just slowly wiggle your fingers and come back into the room. It's quite a short meditation but it's a very powerful one because what it does is it cuts to the core very quickly in terms of you being able to bring awareness to yourself of situations that are around you, what you needed to do for yourself emotionally around those situations but also what do you need to do today to get through and I think that's very important today is all talking about what do you need and what do you want and if you can decipher those two things now look there's no there's no issue of wanting things that's fine but don't get confused on they are life-changing things because life-changing things are what you need the other things are what you want and you can work towards that but don't beat yourself up if you don't ascertain or get to the level or or fulfil the things that you want just care about the things that you need I hope that makes sense put your hand on your heart today and say good morning Julian I love you good morning Julian I love you thank you for watching day 57 day 58 tomorrow which is Saturday here in the UK have a lovely Friday have a lovely evening and god bless you be be love and give love and um and again thanks to everyone for their very kind and supportive messages due to my absolutely career knee injury but again I'm just breathing through it and that's tough I can tell you that for nothing have a lovely day take care see you soon bye bye