Hi, and welcome to your daily mindfulness. So yesterday I spoke about listening to ourselves. And today, I'm going to follow on with this theme and talk about knowing ourselves. So don't worry if you didn't tune in yesterday, you can pick up here just fine. So I think one of the big misconceptions that goes around about mindfulness is that we're going to be able to, I guess, kind of escape ourselves in some way.

We might want to escape certain emotions or certain parts of ourselves, you know. But mindfulness really is not about getting rid of any part of ourselves or our experience. It's about looking deeply into who we already are and how life already is and befriending it. So it's really not about escaping ourselves. It's about knowing ourselves and then being ourselves more fully.

So when we learn this skill of really genuinely becoming comfortable in the present moment and abiding in it with clarity, compassion, and curiosity, we often discover inner peace in the process. So you might think that when you're meditating and we're focusing on the breath or the sensations in the body that we're doing that to get away from ourselves, but actually we're doing that and moving closer to ourselves. We're becoming more intimate with our experience of who we are. We're becoming more familiar with how our mind is, how our emotions are and we're coming into contact with deeper dimensions of ourselves, with awareness itself. And so in this way, we're seeing ourselves more clearly.

We're learning not to run away from ourselves or escape ourselves anymore, but truly we're practicing this art of befriending ourselves. And that means all of ourselves, not just the pleasant stuff, but also the unpleasant or difficult stuff to see. So you might be thinking, why would we want to befriend the unpleasant when it shows up? Well, simply because it's part of the present moment. It's part of our humanity. And so we want to wage peace with ourselves and with the nature of the mind.

Unless we know how to accept ourselves, there's always going to be this sense of being locked in battle with ourselves, a sense of tension within. The other reality is, is that unless we spend time getting to know these parts of ourselves that are a little more difficult to see and start to understand them, we tend to get caught up in them. So by bringing the hard stuff into the light of awareness, we make it less likely that it's going to catch us in its grip. So just remembering that mindfulness is an opportunity to simply relax and let thoughts and emotions be as they are, and to let yourself be as you are. And in doing so you can gradually create more calm and contentment in the mind.

So as always thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And let's settle in for today's meditation.