Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about ending the struggle with our thoughts. So, you know, perhaps one of the most common misperceptions about meditation is this idea that we are supposed to clear our minds of all thoughts and emotions. But that's really not what we're aiming to do. What we're learning instead is to change the way that we relate to thoughts and emotions when they do arise.

We're learning not to struggle with them and we're learning also not to be taken over by them. So one of my favorite analogies for this is the analogy of, you know, imagining yourself, sitting on a park bench on the side of the street and there's all these people that are passing by you. The people in this analogy represent your thoughts and feelings. The park bench that you're sitting on represents your seat in awareness. So in meditation ,in this scenario, all you have to do is sit there relaxed and easy on the park bench and just let these people, let these strangers just walk on by, without leaving your seat of awareness.

Just let them come, go or stay as they please, as you just sit there, resting on the bench. So, this is pretty simple, right? But it's not always that easy in meditation because we often get caught up in engaging with the passers-by, engaging with the thoughts. We get caught up in the stories, the dramas, the plans, and we keep getting up and leaving our seat. We also sometimes get irritated because we wish these passers by would go away and leave us alone. But the truth is is that we don't need the crowd to change or go away.

We can just accept that these passers by will be coming and going as we just sit there, relaxed entities in our seat. It's also important to think about having a warm attitude to these passing strangers, knowing that they're there, but not engaging with them or following them. So, and if someone does catch your eye, in other words, if a thought catches your attention, you can just gently nod your head, acknowledging their presence and just stay calmly resting on the bench. So we can do this in meditation to have this sense of just kind of acknowledging the thought and letting it pass. So training the mind isn't about getting rid of thoughts and feelings or trying to control them.

It's just changing our relationship with them. And by learning to have a less reactive and more skillful relationship with our thoughts, we naturally find a place of ease and rest within ourselves. In today's meditation, I'm going to guide you through a practice of mental noting, to again, get a sense of gently acknowledging thoughts and feelings, letting them pass while we stay in our seat of awareness and in the present moment. So I invite you to settle in for that practice now and as always thank you for your practice and your presence here with us.