Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to talk about how to shift from feeling like your mind is your enemy to embracing your mind as a friend and an ally. So, this is actually one of the things that I noticed is an obstacle for many people when it comes to training the mind. It's this subtle or not so subtle attitude towards the mind that it's an opponent to overcome, an opponent to subdue, control or manipulate. So some people even go as far as to say that they want to destroy the ego, get rid of it.

There's this feeling in other words of aggression towards the mind. So this thing gets set up in our attitude, that awareness as the good guy and that the thinking mind is the bad guy, like they're in opposition to each other. But this is not at all the case with meditation. So when we're training the mind, there's obviously a lot of instruction about, you know, letting go of being caught up in the thinking mind and coming back to awareness, letting go and coming back to awareness. So, of course, sometimes we might feel a little bit frustrated by that experience when the mind wanders and we have to keep bringing it back.

But if we keep believing that the thinking mind is bad and awareness is good, then we're always going to feel this sense of being locked in battle with ourselves. There'll always be this sense of tension and frustration in our meditation. We sort of feel like something's going wrong when thinking's arising. But then if we consider what the essence of meditation is all about, it's actually to rest in this non-judgmental, compassionate and accepting awareness of the present moment. So we have more of an attitude of befriending what's arising, no matter what it is.

And so of course that includes thoughts. So when we're resting in awareness, we're not judging anything as good or bad. We're not trying to fix or change anything. We're not believing that anything should be different than it is. Instead, we honor everything that arises.

And we see that it's in the nature of the mind to think, just like it's in the nature of the sun to shine, it's in the nature of the birds to sing. And so we just let that be as it is. So in meditation, we simply witness thinking. We rest in awareness and in doing so we're no longer caught up in the thoughts so they no longer hook us. So we experience a greater sense of freedom and peace of mind.

So always remember as you practice that your mind is not your enemy and just see if you can embrace, allow it and meet it with a loving awareness that's larger than it all. So as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And now let's settle in for today's meditation.