Hello, everyone, and welcome to this second talk in the series on mindfulness of the body, using the Buddha's teachings on mindfulness of the body, as support for how to work with the challenges that life gives us, no matter what the challenges are. And the second instruction the Buddha gives, and his teachings on mindfulness to the body, is mindfulness of posture. And posture can be a difficult topic for people and challenging sometimes with all kinds of physical conditions that exist. But it's also a part of integral part of human life is we always in some posture, or other physical posture. And the Buddha emphasized the value of bringing attention to it, to really know the posture we're in. And, and then begin discovering the different dimensions that different ways in which mindfulness that posture can support us support us tremendously. And, and in terms of challenges, one of the things that mindfulness of posture can support is that it is a preventive from all our attention, to go into our challenges, and to the our fear or dismay, or preoccupation or imagination, our spinning thoughts. It's all of it goes into the challenges we have, it can be a dark hole, we can collapse, sometimes it It strengthens the sense of inner challenge, the fear, perhaps, or the dismay or the anger, it fuels it and keeps going. And some people will consider spill out and fear or panic, because of the loop between their thinking and, and causing fear and fear causing more thinking. And, or depression, the same thing, there's gonna be this loop. And that loop is strengthened by the degree in which attention is given to those thoughts or attention is given solely to the emotions that are there. And it's remarkable that when there's fear, or when there's anger, when there's confusion, when there's greed, all kinds of these strong forces in the mind, people have a tremendous capacity for concentration. The very people who sit down, sit down to meditate, and they say, I don't have any ability to to concentrate, give them a good threat. And boy, they can be focused on it, though, everything goes into it. And all their thinking and thoughts and feelings. Give them a good thing to be angry with. And boy P some people can be zero in, you know, one point it almost like, boom, they're right there, they're not gonna kind of leave it behind. They're like stuck on it. So we do have, many people have much more capacity for concentration than they realize. It's just harder to do it what for some people when there's nothing, no threat, nothing to blame, nothing to trigger, self preoccupation, self identity, self conceit, which is kind of can be a magnet for preoccupied attention. And so to begin bringing attention to the posture, is to break the hegemony of some of these strong, difficult mind states that come into play, when we are with challenges not denying their real challenges. But the excessive preoccupation with excessive absorption in them is counterproductive. And it's actually works with think that the more attention we can give to something, the better we can take care of it. But actually, sometimes it can do the opposite and when the real challenges in our life. And so we want to find some way for our attention to be be more beneficial for us as we go through these challenges. And one of the ways is to have our attention, rooted or grounded in our body. And one of the ways to do that is to be cognizant of the posture we're in and, and more so in like in meditation, for example, meditation posture, there's a lot of value to having that posture be in intentional. So, you know, you could just kind of lay down in bed and just kind of completely kind of collapse. And for some people laying in bed and just really relaxing is very powerful. I don't want to undermine its value, but you might not get the same benefits. In the long term in daily life, when there's challenges. If you don't, somewhere are there begin cultivating the value of a grounded intentional posture. And intentionally means that there takes a little bit of internal effort, intention to maintain it. If there's an orange metallic, consistently, there has to be consistent attention. So the upright meditation posture eventually becomes second nature. Eventually, there's a kind of meditative energy that keeps us upright and alert. But there's a lot also a kind of foreground or background intentionality, to stay upright. And in the beginning, we're beginners, we slump and we sit up straight, we slump, until we find this place of intentionality, to stay present. And, and to take an intentional posture that allows for presents allows for really being there was something so maybe turning towards something or sitting upright or standing upright in a balanced way, not crossing the arms or crossing legs in such a way that something's obstructed, something is limited, something is closed down, but just sit in a way that everything becomes kind of open available present flowing unobstructed within an intentional posture, and to learn how to be embodied in it to be grounded in the sensations to be inhabiting intentionally and attentionally. This posture, not is the be all and end all for sure. But so that it becomes second nature to be grounded and present in a good way as we go through our challenges. So we learn not to collapse physically, in the presence of our challenges. So we learn not to get into tense up unnecessarily. In the middle of our challenges. The posture is a mirror for seeing what our relationship is to our challenges. And if you're if you have a kind of balanced posture as a reference point, aligned posture that's open, unobstructed present, you'll have a very wonderful reference to catch earlier. If you collapse. If you slump, if you kind of give up. Or if you give into some kind of the pressure of the anger or that pressure of the fear and start spinning out. And the posture is was an early warning sign of what your relationship is that might not be so beneficial for you. It's also a dude maintain a strong balanced posture, rather than collapsing or, or acting out. It's amazing how that is not denying how we're feeling. But it's almost like giving a room for how we're feeling. So some deeper process of unfolding, evolving healing can happen. That cannot happen. If we collapse. It could not happen if we engage from a place of hostility or blame or, or something else. This mindfulness really puts us in our body so that a deeper process of the bodily wisdom and intelligence can kind of move and relax and open up what's going on. So that we can think more clearly. So that we can see the situation more clearly without our projections and our fears and our emotions kind of excessively filtering our perceptions. So to to cultivate, to make a practice of being of intentional, balanced, unobstructed posture in different circumstances. You might try it standing in line in a store.