Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about confidence. Now, there are a lot of ways to think about confidence, but the deepest confidence, in my opinion, comes when you realize there is no you to be confident. Yes, this is one of those annoying Zen-like Buddhist sayings. I'm sorry.

But do hear me out, because I think there's something important here. There are forms of confidence that are related to our self. Self with a capital S. Feeling more equipped for life, feeling in charge of your emotional responses, having good, self-talk, feeling a sense of mastery, et cetera. All of these are important aspects of a certain kind of confidence, and they can also be a sign of your healing and integration.

But there's another form of confidence that, I tend to see in deep contemplative practitioners, like meditation practitioners, that really doesn't have to do with their sense of self or a sense of strength or mastery in the world. It comes because they have no self left to develop or defend. They've seen the illusory nature of their ego and are identified more with the part of themselves that is beyond thought, emotion, and sensory experience. Some would call this part, true nature. Some call it awareness.

Some call it the higher self. Whatever you want to call it, connecting to it gives us access to an entirely different confidence because it's not contingent upon any part of us needing to feel confident. There's nothing to defend, nothing, to protect, nothing to make feel better, and also nothing to hurt. And for the record, I'm interested in both of these forms of confidence, at the level of the self and the level of what we could say non-self. I've met many advanced meditation practitioners who've realized a certain non self-confidence, but still have unhealed pain and loneliness and low self-worth, at the level of their ego structure, which as long as you're going to be human and be in these bodies is going to be a part of our lived experience.

But there's also this other confidence that we can develop that I think is really important. And the fortunate thing here is that at Mindfulness.com, we are exploring that, we're exploring both. Developing a confidence at the level of the self, being more equipped for life, and also exploring what is it like to identify with the part of you that is not your thoughts, not your emotions, not your sensations. That's something we also do in meditation. So you're on the right path.

Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.