Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I want to talk about the importance of feedback. So you are a human with needs, living among other humans with needs. And if you wish to live a life without concern for others, you can live in a cave. But to benefit from the love, the companionship, the resources and protection of other people requires being attuned to how your words and actions are impacting them.

This is just what it means to be part of a community. Sometimes that can go off the rails and we can get too caught up in trying to control each other. That's a form of codependency. But since we have needs that could conflict with another person's needs, it's important that we're opening channels of communication so that we can figure out what is in service of our own individual needs and the collective needs and other individual needs. So since we often have trouble seeing our own patterns, feedback is incredibly important.

Often the thing that we think is true, is such because it's based on our current mental models of the world or certain experiences we've had or traumas we've been through or past experiences that made us feel like this was safe or unsafe, or this is how you get love or don't get love or this is what you should do in this circumstance based on what we've read, based on certain education, based on lived experience. All of that creates our sense of what we believe to be right or true in each moment. And we have to also look at, you know, that is constantly changing for us and what we believe to be true now was different perhaps five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. I don't know anyone who has the same exact beliefs now that they had 10 years ago or 20 years ago. And how is that shifting? Well, we're getting feedback.

We're sharing ourselves with the world. We're sharing our ideas, and then we're hearing different perspectives. We read something that gives us a different perspective. We listen to something that gives us a different perspective. We hear someone who maybe really thought deeply on this topic, and then we see a political situation differently, or relationship dynamic differently or something within us that was, you know, a pattern that we thought was the right way to respond, but actually it wasn't the right way to respond or is no longer the appropriate way to respond for us.

The only way that we get this information is by sharing ourselves and receiving feedback. So feedback is an essential aspect of how we learn about ourselves and how we continue to grow. Otherwise we're living in our own echo chamber, and that will just lead us thinking the same thoughts, emoting the same emotions and behaving in the same way. And it's not a recipe for growth. So hopefully this gives you something to think about in terms of how feedback can be useful in your own growth.

And how you take in what feedback is going to serve you is a personal process and something that you can use, make up to your own discernment. Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.