Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about this habit in the human mind of always becoming rather than simply being. So when we're training in cultivating awareness, which is what we're doing through mindfulness, we're not trying to live up to some kind of ideal image of ourselves, we're not trying to get rid of parts of ourselves and we're not trying to become something more than we already are. In fact, what we're doing is the opposite of those things. What we're learning to do is to let go of all of that and finally let ourselves be.

So mindfulness is about actually unwinding all the striving and searching and seeking in the mind and learning to actually simply be with our moment to moment experience just as it is, meeting it all with acceptance, equanimity and open-heartedness. So if our experience is that sometimes when we're practicing, we have some insight or some inner peace and sometimes we have none, then that's our experience. If sometimes we're getting caught up in emotions and thoughts, and other times we're able to step back, then that's our experience. If sometimes we're hurting and sometimes we're happy, that's our experience. So in other words, we're not trying to get anywhere else, we're not trying to change anything or make anything happen, we're not trying to acquire anything.

We're becoming awake to the unfolding of this very moment, however, it shows up. We're learning to rest within it, wage peace with it, bring unconditional acceptance of love to it. So when we sit to meditate, if we can let go of all these ideas of progress and all the judgements and expectations about how we think this moment should be, how we think we should be, if we can let go of all those ideas of becoming, then we can discover new degrees of freedom and peace in the mind. And enjoy that profound, inner calm that comes from simply being. In today's meditation, I'm going to guide you a little bit more into letting go of becoming.

So let's settle in for that now. And as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us.