Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I'm going to share three steps to expand your mind. F Scott Fitzgerald said the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in our mind at the same time, without losing the ability to function. Being human means to live with many opposing views to our own. Certain views we hold now might be different a year from now.

Life is full of polarities, paradoxes, and dialectics. Well, a big part of what we're interested in here at mindfulness.com is helping you become more calm and at peace. An even bigger intention is to help you and all of us be more quick to show up fully in this world and hold all of its complexity with greater presence and groundedness. To expand your mind enough to hold the many complexities of life is often uncomfortable because it means expanding beyond your usual constructs of how you perceive the world should work, how you think things should happen, how other people must behave, etcetera. Thus, one way to see what the bounds of our mind are, is to start to notice when we get defensive, over reactive, overwhelmed, or we go numb, we disconnect.

So when this happens, instead of immediately writing that person off or writing that thing off, my encouragement is to try three things. First, what is the truth that I'm holding? Get in touch with that. What is the deep belief that you're holding in that moment of how things should be? And then ask, what is a different truth that might also be possible? What is this person's truth or a different truth that I can perceive? And then the third step, try to hold both truths at once. That's where we start to expand. The more we do this, the more we find a sense of groundedness, holding multiple perspectives.

And if there's anything, I think our world needs it's minds that can hold complexity, nuance, and polarity. So thank you for doing the work. Thank you for your practice. I'll talk to you in the meditation soon and until then take care.