Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about the relationship between mindfulness and surrender. So I'm sure you've heard the different definitions there are of mindfulness. Paying attention on purpose in the present moment non-judgmentally, and many others. I've often found that the truest expression of mindfulness is a deep surrender to what is here now.

A deep surrender to what is here now. And there's something about that word surrender that can bring up different things for different people. For some, it feels like weakness. For some, it feels like passively resigning to what is here. For me, I've always perceived it as a really profound strength.

Oh, I don't know if I've always perceived it that way, but I've learned to appreciate it as a deep strength. When I think of surrender, I think of the ego letting go. I think of the ego recognizing that it doesn't have all the answers. It doesn't have all the resources. It can't control everything.

And when we come to the, that recognition and we release that form of relating to our life, something in us softens, relaxes, expands. And to me, that's the surrender that I'm talking about here. A deep surrender to what is here now, the truth of what is here right now, the reality of what is here right now. Even if we don't like it. We don't endorse it.

We don't want it to be here. There's this recognition of this, this is a moment of my life. This is the reality of my life right now. I can't control. It's already here and there's only so much I can do to constantly manipulate my environment to make it the way I want it to be.

And so what would it be like for something in me to just truly surrender to this moment of my life, this emotion, this thought moving through my mind, this sensation I'm experiencing this confusion? The mind and the heart are big enough and vast enough to hold it all. It's the ego, the part of us that wants to control to make everything predictable, to make it all make sense. That's the part of us that is, that is small that kind of refuses to be in this moment, that will only like it if it goes according to its plan. Those are the moments that the ego likes. But unpredictability, uncertainty, confusion, that's not the ego's game.

And that's when we'll feel constriction. Which is why mindfulness or the truest expression of mindfulness, I always perceive as this deep surrender into just what is here right now. We let go of the ego mind and we expand. We rest in our expansiveness to hold the depth, the nuance, the bigness of this moment of being human. So maybe this gives you something to think about and hopefully something to practice while we go into our meditation.

So thank you for your practice and let's settle in for our meditation now.