Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to talk about the importance of acceptance. So there's a story about this. There once was a man who was determined to have a beautiful lawn around his house. So he worked on it every week, watering it, seeding it, but he had a problem.

No matter what he did, dandelions kept growing up through the lawn. So whenever he saw the dandelions, he got really annoyed, went out and immediately pulled them all out. But they just grew right back. So after a few weeks of frustration and anger with this situation, he went to the store, bought some weed killer. He's like, I'm going to sort this out.

He sprayed it all over the place. And it worked for a while, but it also damaged the lawn. And then after it rained, the dandelions we're growing back again. So frustrated, he decided the problem must be the type of soil they were growing in. So he pulled up the entire lawn, put down new soil turf.

This time he thought, I've got this licked. So he started to relax. But of course he looked over and again, within a few days, dandelions were growing up through the new grass. Now he was getting really worked up and really frustrated and really stressed. So he concluded that the dandelions, after all of this, must be coming from the neighbor's yard.

So he went on a secret campaign to kill all the neighbors dandelions in the whole neighborhood. He weeded, he sweated, he sprayed, he snuck around in the night. But a year later, after totally exhausting himself, he still had dandelions growing up through his lawn. So after trying everything and coming to the end of his wits, he finally wrote to the Department of Agriculture and he wrote to them saying, telling them the story about how horrible this war with dandelions is for him. So after some time he got a letter back and he was so excited.

As he opened the envelope, he thought, finally, I'm going to get the help I need. The letter read, Dear Sir, we have considered your problem carefully and consulted with all of our experts. We believe that we have the very best advice for you. Our advice is that you learn to love those dandelions. So this story can serve as a great metaphor for how we too can get stuck in a quite, unhelpful attitude sometimes of resistance towards life.

Like the man in this story, we all have times when the reality of our lives contains dandelions of one kind or another. There's just, there's things that arise that are annoying or unpleasant or unwanted and painful that we just can't control no matter how much we try. And as they arise, it's wise to remember that we do have a choice in how we handle the situation. We can resist it, or we can accept it. We can wage war with life, or we can wage peace.

We can make ourselves miserable and agitated about what's happening or we can learn to find peace and even joy amongst the dandelions of our lives. So if we can set aside our ideas of how we think life should or shouldn't be, relax our agendas and just accept day-to-day life as it is, we're going to find greater degrees of peace, equanimity, and presence in the middle of it all. So as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here. And let's settle in for today's meditation.