Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to be talking about how to be more equanimous with what other people say about you. Now, I will be the first to admit that this is not easy territory, because it seems like second nature that if a person says something good about us, then we will feel better about ourselves and kind of really hold onto those words and the perception of ourselves. At the same time, if someone says something about us that's more negative, we'll likely feel anger, resentment, resistance, or hurt. And, you know, we're also likely to really mull over those words and struggle with them in all kinds of ways.

We're probably also more likely to dislike the person who expressed the more negative view of us or our behavior. So we can become very emotionally thrown around by what other people say about us. We tend to often really cling to their words. But the reality is that words are just that, words. And we need not be so affected by them all the time.

So in meditation, as we train the mind, we start to get a lot better at becoming non-reactive to our thoughts. So instead of believing them, really being thrown around by them or playing them out, we learn not to take our thoughts so seriously and not take them so personally. Therefore we're really not so affected by them and we maintain more inner calm, steadiness and confidence. We also get better at working skillfully with thoughts. You know, we discern the difference between thoughts that are helpful, which we might choose to engage with and thoughts that are not so helpful, which we choose to let go.

Now we can extend this same kind of practice with the words of other people. We can recognize that, in the same way that thoughts come and go in the mind, the words of others will come and go in our lives. We really don't need to take them so seriously or personally. We don't need to buy into them or react to them. If they're helpful in some way, if they're nourishing to us, if they're empowering, we can engage with them.

If they're not so helpful, we can practice letting them go. We don't need to carry them with us. Now, of course, you might be thinking, gosh, you make it sound so easy to just let them go. But I assure you that with continued practice both in meditation and in daily life, we really can develop our ability to be non-reactive and at peace with ourselves and maintain confidence, no matter what anyone says. As the Buddha once said, "Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow, they all come and go like the wind.

To be truly happy, learn to rest like a giant tree in the middle of them all." As always, thank you for your practice and your presence here. And let's settle in now for today's meditation.