Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to talk about the backwards law. So the backwards law is a term that was coined by philosopher, Alan Watts that pertains to the fact that when it comes to many of the most important things in life, happiness, inner peace feelings of satisfaction with your life, the best way to actually move closer to them is often to let go of striving so hard to have them all the time. Allan states that the more fervently you pursue, for instance, the feeling of being happy all the time or this idea that we should be happy all the time, often the less satisfied you become, the more you feel like things are not going okay in the moment. And, I mean, let's face it, many of us do live with this idea that we should always be happy and at peace.

Right? It's this kind of like this idea in the back of our head, but this is not really the nature of human life. And if we can accept that simple truth, we discover a greater sense of inner peace and ironically with our lives just as they are. In many ways, the backwards law really gets to the heart of what creates much of our restlessness, stress, and mental struggles and our discontent in life are all about. Because we often have this really strong desire to control things in a way where all of our problems and pains go away and we cling to the idea that we should always be happy. And we never really pause to think, is that even possible? Is that even what we really want? I mean, reflexively, you might think yes, of course that's what I want.

But when we lose someone really close to us, would we want to be happy in that moment? If we had no sadness, would we even be able to appreciate what it means to be happy? If we didn't have times of suffering and challenge, would we be able to grow as people? The truth is that to live a full human life, we need to experience the full spectrum of human emotion throughout the journey of our life. When we let go of striving so hard to control things, pushing away pain and clinging to happiness, all of a sudden what also emerges is a deep sense of inner peace and fulfillment that exists beyond or beneath that sort of everyday happiness. It's that peace and fulfillment that's not dependent on external events, that's there when we're happy and it's also there when we're sad. In this way, we carry with us a peace of mind that's at ease with all of the different feelings, at ease with all of the different circumstances that arise in our lives. So rather than striving so hard towards feeling happy or thinking something's wrong if happiness is not there, instead of aiming to be present with and accepting how things are right now.

And finding that sense of okayness with life, no matter how it appears in any given moment. As always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And now let's settle in for today's meditation.