Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about liking and disliking. So when we're going about daily life, the mind tends to constantly categorize our experience into good and bad, like and dislike. Now, this is something that happens mostly unconsciously. For instance, we like one coworker, we dislike another.

We like Friday afternoons, but we dislike Monday mornings. We like the drive to the beach, but we dislike the drive to work. We like the sound of the birds in the morning, but not the sound of our neighbor's dog. Now, while it's natural for us, from an evolutionary perspective, to like some things like a warm, safe shelter or sweet food and to dislike other things like shivering from the cold. Many things that we experience in life are actually not inherently unpleasant or pleasant.

We just experienced them that way because of our own judgments. So for example, whether you're driving to the beach or you're driving to work, your actual driving experience could be pretty much the same, but your view of it can totally change your experience and your mood. If you like it, you experience it as pleasant. And if you decide you don't like the drive, it can become kind of like a burdensome chore. I once had a lady on retreat with me who said that she hated porridge.

And the thing is that we were getting served porridge every single morning. So she found herself getting really, really irritated. But then she reported on day four of the retreat. She decided to try the porridge without judgment. And she said that she actually tasted it in that moment for the first time and she found it was actually quite enjoyable when she let go of the judgment.

I've actually been joking about this in retreats ever since. In the same way this lady was becoming irritated by her judgment that the porridge was bad, we can make daily life much more difficult than it needs to be when we keep judging things as bad or disliking them. So as soon as we do that, I often say, you know, we put crap colored lenses on, the opposite of rose colored ones. And we experience lots of things as more unpleasant than they actually are. So the invitation today is to try seeing and experiencing things without the judgments.

So this can be challenging, but just aiming to be curious and open-minded to what it might be like to experience what's there beyond the judgments in the mind. So as an experiment, try letting go of judgment in moments where you might normally find dislike arising. A red light, a slow car, a loud noise, a certain person, a long line - in those moments, experiment with seeing how it feels to let go of all of your preferences and judgements altogether. I think you'll find that when you let go of those judgments, you also let go of a lot of reactivity, stress and suffering and make space for more inner peace to emerge. As always, thank you for your practice and your presence here.

And let's settle in for today's meditation.