Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I'm going to share my nuanced thoughts on positive thinking. So positive thinking is something I do a lot of thinking about because I know the importance of it. It is important to have a positive mindset, to have a growth mindset, to be able to meet a difficult moment and not fall into despair. All of that can end up leading to more anxiety and more depression.

However, there's also toxic positivity, where we tend to overlay positive thinking onto an experience that actually doesn't need positive thinking, but it needs us to feel it more deeply. And this is what I want to point to more specifically, that while positive thinking can be important and can temporarily help us move through an experience that might be painful because we're thinking about the future and we're getting more excited about the future and it removes us from what's happening in the present. A lot of times the negative thoughts that are moving through our mind are not necessarily due to an acute experience that's happening right here or because our mind is untrained, but rather because something deeper beneath the surface is unresolved. There's an unresolved emotion. There's an unresolved trauma.

There's a difficult experience that maybe we're going through or have been going through the last couple of weeks that we've just had to compartmentalize so that we can go to work and continue doing what we're doing, but it's still lingering in the background. And often those thoughts that feel agitating or negative, again, they're not because your mind isn't positive enough, or it's not trained enough, but instead there's something beneath the thinking mind that needs to be resolved or needs to be worked through a process. So while positive thinking can be important, if you find that you're using it, but still feel agitation in your system or the mind quickly goes back to something negative, there may be something you need to make space for. And in those moments, instead of trying to think positive, I would drop into the body. Notice what's here on a deeper level.

What are you feeling? Give yourself permission to feel what you're feeling. You don't have to dive into all of it if it's too uncomfortable, but take some time to drop beneath the thinking mind and really get a sense of what is here that might be unresolved in me. As you make space for that within you, it will start to arise, but it will also give you the opportunity to meet it with compassion and presence. And that's how these emotions and these even smaller traumas start to get resolved in our system so that they can be released, processed, integrated, and then let go. Meditation practice helps with this, of course, but I just want you to have some of this background as you're navigating the relationship between positive thinking and meditation and feeling into your experience.

There's a lot of nuance here and hopefully this adds to how you're able to think about it in your own journey. Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.