Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I want to talk about taking things personally. So I want you to imagine for a second that you're having a relaxing picnic with a friend on a warm spring day and you go for a swim. And then when you come back to the picnic, you suddenly see that the whole picnic spread is all over the grass. The wine is spilled.

The food is all over the place. And as you run back towards the picnic area to see what happened, what do you see? Some people had snuck up to the picnic, flipped over the picnic blanket, thrown everything around as a practical joke on you. And now they're laughing at you from behind some trees. How do you feel? Okay. So now imagine go back to the start, the exact same situation again.

You're at the picnic. It's a lovely day. You go to have a swim. You come back and again, you see the food and wine spilled all over the place. And what do you realize? A strong wind had blown all the blankets everywhere and thrown all of the picnic all over the place.

This time, how do you feel? So the end result is the same in both cases. Wine is spilled, food's all over the place, picnic is ruined. But when you feel personally targeted, it's a lot more aggravating and upsetting, right? If you think about it though, in both cases, it's not personal, in the sense that whatever's going on inside the people who ruined the picnic has been set in motion by a stream of thousands of causes and effects that preceded this event. The upbringing of those people, the stresses in their lives, their health or lack thereof, the movies and marketing they've seen, and so many more tiny little causes and effects that linked in a big chain to that moment of choice to throw the picnic blanket. In a way it's not any more personal than all of the causes and effects that would set that breeze in motion that day, that also leads to the same outcome.

So we tend to do take a lot of other people's behavior quite personally, right? Whether it's someone who pulls out in front of us in traffic, a rude comment by a shop clerk, a friend who doesn't turn up to dinner on time or a partner who doesn't take out the garbage. And when we do that, we often feel really aggravated, hurt and angry when we take things personally. But instead of taking things personally, we can consider what may have been the causes that led to this person's behavior. Perhaps they have stress, pain, or worries in their life. Maybe they're having a bad day, maybe their particular upbringing or personality or past experiences mean they see the world really differently to you.

Maybe you haven't communicated to them clearly, or there's been some kind of misunderstanding. So in other words, just recognizing that other people's actions have been set in motion by a constellation of causes, much of which is actually beyond even their conscious control. And it really truly is not personal. It's not about you. So when you do this, you put the situation in context.

You become less reactive, more clear headed, so you can take any appropriate action if needed. So today, see if you can take things a little less personally, so you can live with a little more ease, awareness and compassion. So let's settle in now for today's meditation. And as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us.