Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to talk about happiness versus fulfillment. So there are times when we experience things that are pleasant in life, right? Maybe pleasant emotions like elation or contentment, or we have pleasant experiences like eating an ice cream or getting something we want. Other times we might experience unpleasant emotions. Pain, we don't get what we want.

And we might feel unwanted emotions like sadness or anxiety. So pleasant and unpleasant come and go constantly in the flow of our lives. By allowing the pleasant and unpleasant to arise and pass through our lives without chasing clinging or fighting with them, we discover true freedom, true fulfillment. So what I'm talking about out here is a fulfillment that lies beneath the passing emotions of happiness and sadness, a fulfillment that lies beneath the constantly changing flow of pleasant and unpleasant events, situations, and circumstances in our lives. If you think about it, there's simply no way, even on a day-to-day basis that we can get everything to be pleasant and always feel the emotion of happiness and push away all the sadness.

We just don't have that kind of control over life. And there is a part of ourselves that's there when we're happy and it's there when we're sad, it's there when things are hard and it's there when things are easy. It's the ever present awareness that's deeper than emotion, deeper than thoughts, deeper than anything that arises and passes away. And if we touch into that deeper dimension of ourselves, whether it's in meditation or in everyday life, we can begin to familiarize ourselves with that sense of wholeness, calm and fulfillment, that doesn't depend on anything outside of ourselves. So the invitation for today is this.

Rather than chasing happiness and trying to hold onto it, rather than trying to fight off sadness or escape the unpleasant, see if you can meet them both with a kind of grace, a sense of equanimity and acceptance. And just keep resting back into presence, back into awareness itself. And in doing so cultivating a deeper form of lasting contentment and fulfillment. So I encourage you to really experiment with this and notice how it feels for you, each time you let go of clinging, let go of trying to push anything away and just resting in presence. Enjoy today's practice.

And as always, thank you for doing this work in your life. And now let's settle in for today's meditation.