Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. So today I'm just going to start off by sharing a short poem with you called Inner Strength. If you can start the day without caffeine, if you can always be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains, if you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles, if you can eat the same food every day and be grateful for it, if you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time, if you can take criticism and blame without resentment, if you can conquer tension without medical help, if you can relax without alcohol, if you can sleep without the aid of drugs, then you're probably the family dog. So the message here, friend, is to remember to hold yourself lightly, Hey, go easy on yourself. Sometimes when we're on the path of mindful living, we can get really serious and self critical and have really perfectionistic expectations of ourselves.

You know, I think part of holding ourselves lightly is having a healthy sense of humor about our humanness and our messiness and our flaws and our quirks. It allows us to kind of be more honest with ourselves. And more curious about ourselves. Not to take things so personally, even as we continue to grow and evolve. And you know, in a way it's not personal, because most of what you're going through on the path of mindfulness is what we're all going through.

It's part of the shared human condition. What your crazy mind does, most of our crazy minds are doing too. And if we can learn to smile at the antiques of the mind a bit and even laugh at them, we can more easily let them go. And even when the mind starts really whipping up in a turmoil and getting really serious, we can even learn to crack jokes and smile about that too. If we remember to bring them that playfulness, that humor, now kind of lightness into our meditation and our life, it all becomes much more joyful and fun experience.

So as best you can for the rest of the day and the week, if you, can just remember to hold yourself lightly. We'll be bringing a little bit more of this attitude into our meditation today, but as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us.