Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I'm going to share a tip for making hard decisions. So on a day-to-day basis, in a moment to moment basis, we are always making decisions. Simple benign decisions, such as: should I have this extra cup of coffee? Should I go to the bathroom now or hold it? Should I take this phone call or work on emails instead? Every moment, we're making decisions. But a lot of times we're making harder decisions.

Should I move? Should I take this job? Should I have this difficult conversation? Should I be with this person? And often when we're trying to make a decision, we're focusing on the yeses to that decision and the nos to that decision, the pros and the cons. And there can be a big emphasis on why we would want to say yes to this decision, especially if it's something that we're we're pulling for. And we tell ourselves all the reasons why it's really good, why we'd be excited about. Maybe trying to convince ourselves of it. And then we'll focus on the cons as well, but might not go fully into those cons, especially if we feel like ah that would be, that might sway us in a direction toward a no.

And we don't really need to go into that. We don't want to be negative. Let's focus more on like, why we'd be excited about this decision. However, if we don't allow ourselves to fully embody our nos, we can't fully embody our yes. I'll say that again, and really let this one sink in.

If we don't allow ourselves to fully embody our nos, we can't fully embody our yes. And why is that? Well, think about the decisions that you've struggled with. You, you're telling yourself it's really good for a certain reason. You're really caught up in the story of why it's good, why you might be excited about. But there's something in it that just feels like, I don't know if this is the right thing.

And you think about maybe the downsides of it, you kind of touch them but it feels painful to really go into those downsides. And it feels like that might hold a lot of weight. So instead since I really want this to work, I just focus more on the yes, the yes, the yes. But by not going into the no, and not really going into the depth of the fear, it just sort of lingers there. It remains there, even when we're caught up in the story of the yes.

That's what keeps this lingering feeling of, I don't know if this is the right decision. The only way to get around that is to descend into the no, to really go into that fear and really see, what is this? What is this that I'm scared of? What is this that's telling me no? And let yourself embody it fully, to feel it fully and to understand it fully. Once you do, interestingly, what often happens is we realize, alright, yeah, there are some concerns here, but since I've looked at it so clearly, and I've allowed myself to feel it fully, I realize I can be okay with that. If we don't drop into that, it just remains this subconscious feeling of, Hmm, maybe this is something that we should avoid. And so, if we want to get to a place of having a really clean yes around something or a really clean no around something, we have to very deeply go into and embody what those cons, what those nos are first until we can actually get to some clarity and a clarity that includes the fullness of us, not just the story of our mind about why we want it to work or don't want it to work.

So hope this gives you something to think about, especially if you are navigating some hard decisions in your life. Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.