Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today we're going to talk about softening and letting go of self judgment. So one of the most important qualities that we cultivate through mindfulness is a non-judging mind. That's because this habit of constantly critiquing and labeling and judging others, ourselves, and our life circumstances can create quite a lot of tension, stress and suffering. It can also really distort our ability to see things clearly.

So most of the time we're judging things in life automatically. You know, we see things as attractive or unattractive, good or bad, a success or failure. You know, rude or nice, et cetera. It sort of just happens unconsciously. Now this use of some amount of judgment in life, of course, can be really useful because it can help to inform us about our life choices.

But many of our judgments can be pretty unhelpful. Now, this is especially true when we point the judging mind at ourselves. The inner critic, as we call it, often really diminishes our self esteem and can really crush our confidence. It bullies and cajoles us. It pushes us until our body and mind are way past their limits.

And we often do this in an attempt to prove our worth as the voice of the inner critic just keeps telling us we're not enough yet, we're not enough yet. The inner critic can be especially harsh when we make a mistake or something, doesn't go our way. So how can we learn to soften the judging mind so that we can stop being at war with ourselves and have more ease confidence and authentic connection in our lives? One way we can do this, of course, is through meditation because meditation mirrors the way we live our lives. So if we can bring awareness to our judgments in meditation and really shift the way we relate with them, we can train ourselves bit by bit to be patient, non-judgmental and compassionate with ourselves. And then we naturally bring these qualities into our lives.

So in today's meditation, I'm going to give you some more guidance on letting go of self-judgment. But also today, see if you can experiment with what it's like to bring a compassionate and non-judgmental attitude into your life. See if you can let go of the shoulds, the have- tos, the labels and the fixed ideas about yourself. Try to notice how often you judge yourself and others. And as best you can, practice softening the critical, judging mind by responding with compassion, patience, and non-judgment.

I wish you a wonderful day of practice with this. And as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us in this community. And let's settle in for meditation.