Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today we're going to talk about how to embrace and accept all of who you are. So our personality traits, quirks, and emotions, and all of our condition patterns are as natural as the clouds in the sky. They're part of the human condition, but so often we feel like we need to get rid of certain parts of ourselves, overcome them, fix them, or deny them. But we don't need to be free of these parts of ourselves.

We just need to learn to meet them with awareness and befriend them. This is such an important thing to know. Mindfulness is not a perfection project, rather, it's a whole hearted embrace of the full spectrum of human emotion and experience. It's a whole hearted embrace of these moment and ourselves just as we are in all of our messiness, wonder and beauty. We're not trying to get rid of certain emotions or thoughts nor are we trying to get rid of certain parts of ourselves.

More to the point, we don't have a choice. We're going to experience emotions. We're going to experience thoughts and conditioned patterns and old habits. And this is a good thing. To live.A full human life is to experience the full range of human emotions.

We don't want to throw that away. The most important thing is the ability to be able to kind of step back and observe our emotions, our reactive patterns and our conditioning so we're not swept up in them, so we're not overwhelmed by them. Perhaps one day, even getting to a point where we accept and even love them. And when we're able to do that, then we're truly free. Because you see, the paradox is that living a full human life is not about getting it all together, but it's about embracing the not-togetherness in a loving awareness that's larger than it all.

That's peace. That's mindfulness. So in the spirit of cultivating more of that in our lives, let's now settle in for today's practice and as always thank you for your practice and your presence here with us.