Hi, and welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about the relationship between calling other people out and calling ourselves out. So let's start by considering the notion of calling out hate when we see it in others or in our community. This is a big thing in our culture at the moment. And while I have mixed feelings about things like cancel culture, I do think it's important for us to name something when we see it that doesn't seem to sit right, because it helps all of us grow, especially as a community.

And in addition to calling out hate when you see it in others, I also think it's really important to explore where the seeds of hate may exist in you. Making others wrong is often an easy way to avoid doing our own inner work and seeing that we are much more similar than we may wish to believe. And I don't believe we can get to where we want to go as a global community by constantly othering people, making them wrong, saying I'm good, you're bad. In order to move toward connection, compassion, and collective collaboration for the world we wish to create, we need to see more of ourselves in others and more of others in ourselves. And as painful as it might be to admit, the seeds that create the words and behaviors we most condemning others, exist in all of us.

And the seeds that create the words and behaviors we tend to believe only exist in our group, exist in all of us. Also important to note a person rarely believes they are doing harm. Most words and actions come from a belief that this is what is right, even if it seems massively distorted from our point of view. And this is true across the board from politics to even terrorism. So if we're to learn how to work with the different expressions of other people, we need to also learn how to work with the different expressions of ourselves.

But notice also that I started this by saying, in addition to calling out hate, rather than saying before calling out hate, you need to do this. This is an example of a subtle distinction that I think is quite important. At this point in time, in my reflection on it at least, I don't believe we need to wait until we've done all of our inner work before we speak out. Overall I do think we have a good intuition for when something is off. And I think it's important to speak up about it when we see it, not necessarily for the sake of canceling someone, but for the sake of starting a conversation, raising awareness and better understanding different perspectives on both sides.

We might not have the full story and sharing how something lands for us, opens up the doors for clarification. The main takeaway here is that we are much more similar than we often wish to think. And simply calling someone out without also turning the mirror toward ourselves is the easiest way to further fracture the many parts of ourselves and the many parts of our global community. So thanks for your practice. Thank you for caring and let's settle in for today's meditation.