Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about self-improvement versus self-love. So often in life, we become quite fixated on the idea of improving ourselves. Right? And I think when people initially come to mindfulness, they have the idea of that that's what mindfulness is really about. It's about improving ourselves.

But mindfulness is not so much about improving ourselves, fixing or changing ourselves in any way. It's actually about knowing ourselves and being ourselves more fully. It's actually about unwinding from the thoughts that tell us we're not enough yet, we're not there yet, we're not okay as we are. And it teaches us to abide in a deeper place within ourselves, a place of wholeness, calm and contentment. And I can tell you from firsthand experience that it's such a profound relief when we can learn to simply accept ourselves as we are and finally let ourselves be.

Now, this doesn't mean that we're never going to do anything to improve our life circumstances, we're not going to give up on our morals or values. Rather, it means just unwinding from the stories that tell us we're not good enough, that we're deficient and that we need to be fixed so that we can live our lives and make our choices from a place of confidence, fullness and self-love. So we do things in other words, from mindset of love, rather than the mindset of deficiency. So the difference between self-improvement and self-love is summed up really beautifully in this passage from a Bob Sharples book. And the book is called, Meditation: Calming the Mind.

So in it, he says, "Don't meditate to fix yourself, to heal yourself, to improve yourself, or to redeem yourself. Rather do it as an act of love, of deep, warm friendship to yourself. And in this way, there's no longer any need for the subtle aggression of self-improvement, for the endless guilt of not doing enough. It actually offers a possibility of an end to the ceaseless rounds of trying so hard that wraps so many people's lives in a knot. Instead, now there's meditation as an act of love.

How endlessly delightful and encouraging." So today, here's my invitation. Rather than trying to make yourself into something else, see if you can switch the focus today to just loving and accepting yourself just as you are, right now, no strings attached, no ifs, no buts, no conditions. And if the inner critic pipes up, don't buy into those thoughts. See if you can drop all of that self prodding, smile at the mind's antics and just bring the focus back to acceptance. And when we stop trying to change ourselves, we can then learn to simply be ourselves.

And then we can touch down on that endlessly, delightful and encouraging place within ourselves. And there you are. There's the loving awareness and the wholeness that you are seeking all along. On that note, let's settle in for today's meditation. And as always thank you for your practice and your presence here with us.