Another common obstacle to meditation is distractions, distractions in the environment around you. And also internal distractions. For example, you sit down to meditate and everything's quiet and peaceful. And one minute into your meditation, you start hearing a conversation just outside your room. Or maybe there's a construction site, a block away, and you start hearing a jackhammer, or mobile bubble football. So what do we do in this?

In this situation, the inclination of the mind is to run away and say, Oh, I can't meditate like this, this too noisy in the environment, I need a quiet and peaceful place. But what you'll realize is that almost anywhere you go will have some distractions, whether distractions in the sound, or they might be internal distractions, distractions we bring about ourselves, like distracting thoughts and distracting emotions.

So today, we're going to learn how to work with distractions of any kind, whether it's an external distraction, like sounds, or sights or smells, or internal distractions, like feelings in the body or emotions or thoughts. No matter what the distraction is, we can work with it in the same way.

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