Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to talk about the side effects of mindfulness practice versus the goal of mindfulness practice. So when we're practicing meditation, you know, whether the mind becomes quiet and calm is actually really not that important. Whether we experience deep levels of relaxation is not so important. If we're feeling pleasant emotions or unpleasant emotions, it's really not so important.

Sometimes the mind is calm. Sometimes the mind's busy. Sometimes we're relaxed. Sometimes we're not. Sometimes we experience really pleasant emotions and sometimes unpleasant ones.

Our only objective in practice is to be present with things just as they are. So it's really easy to confuse the goal of meditation with the side effects. So it's good to remind ourselves from time to time that meditation is training in awareness. It's learning to be fully present in the moment, no matter what's arising, and meeting it all in a compassionate and accepting awareness. So we can have this kindly awareness when there's tension or relaxation, busy mind or quiet mind, uplifting emotions or difficult emotions.

When we're practicing presence. Of course, very often. What does happen is the mind begins to settle iand quiet and the body begins to relax and feelings of serenity, and even joy can start to emerge. These are really pleasant side effects of our practice. But those side-effects, won't always be there.

That's just not how the human experience works. Sometimes there'll be there, sometimes they won't. And we shouldn't be disappointed when they do not arise or take their absence to mean anything about how deep or successful or good our practice was. In fact, our practice is often the richest when we have to muster up the strength to bring a kindly awareness to the really tricky stuff. You know, when the mind's very agitated when we're hurting, when we're stressed.

So through training in awareness in this way, we train in living our lives more wholeheartedly, more fully, and more wisely. Because as we learn to abide in awareness and compassion, no matter what arises, we gain the ability to have a love affair with the full spectrum of our human experience and the full journey of our lives. So it was always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And now let's settle in for today's meditation. And as we do, just remembering that the goal is simply to be present as best you can.

But of course you can also enjoy the beautiful side effects.