Welcome back, and we're going to continue to talk about what is meditation. And now we're going to talk about the two tools that the meditator uses to get into a deeper state of meditation. Now, the first of these two tools and you'll see this commonality between this and work talked about in the last video. The first tool is mindfulness, the power of mindfulness. Now you can have Skype all the talk about mindfulness these days. in psychology, there's mindfulness based acceptance, commit mindfulness based cognitive therapy, there's Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, there's acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

And there's a whole lot of new psychological techniques that psychologists are using to help people deal with the stresses and difficulties of the mind. And for me, what's really great about that is, it's really, the basis is the same thing that has been being taught by the ancient sages, for thousands of years. And so it's really a reinforcement, whether you're the type of person who likes scientific proof on how to work with the mind, or whether you're the type of person who listens to the great saints of thousands of years ago, both of them are now saying the same thing that mindfulness is key to having a healthy, balanced, powerful mind. So what is mindfulness? Well, mindfulness for me is about knowing what is going on in your mind at any given moment. And so it's very much related to being in the present moment.

So if your mind is being in the present moment, you're concentrating on either one of your five senses means you're concentrating on what You're seeing smelling, hearing, feeling or tasting at the moment, or you're concentrating on your thought processes and what's going on in your mind. Now, why this is important is because if you're aware of what's going on in your mind your thought patterns at this very point in time, you have the power to do something about it. Now, sometimes you might choose not to do something about it, but at least you know, then what is going on in your mind and you have the chance. So compare this to what we often do is we get lost in these stories, either things that happened to us weeks or years ago, or planning for the future about what might happen. And we go over these scenarios in our mind as we go over these negative or positive scenarios, scenarios that puts us into these negative or positive states.

Whereas if we're conscious of what's going on On in the mind at this point in time, we're able to do something about it. And this brings us to the next tool that we have. And that is the tool of insights. So we've got mindfulness and insight are the two tools we use. So insight is related to the wisdom that we talked about recognizing the patterns of the line. But more than that, it's also knowing what to do with those patterns.

So if you do find that you're meditating and you're getting frustrated about something, you have already practiced it. And you may have gained insight about what you need to do, maybe or meditate on a different subject to get rid of that frustration. If you're meditating, you're finding yourself falling asleep and you realize you need to make your mind alert. Then insight is first of all, the ability to know when you're falling asleep and also to know what to do about it. So these are the two tools But we use with meditation. On the one hand, it's mindfulness, which I actually compare with like the muscle of the mind, a strong mind is one, which knows what it's thinking about at any one time.

So that's sort of building on the strength of the mind. And then insight, which is the intelligence of the mind of knowing what to do. And of course, that comes from listening to teachings and suggestions like this. And then of course, your own practice. And sometimes, you'll come up with your own methods of how to deal with your particular patterns. You know, whether that's anxiety or depression or frustration or attachment or whatever.

So those are the two tools. And I'd like you to think about those as we move forward into the meditations.