Befriending Your Internal World

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I want to talk about befriending all the parts of you. In my experience as a teacher and as a practitioner who has spent thousands of hours paying careful attention to my internal experience through meditation, I still can't find an example of a time when it's actually beneficial to create an oppositional relationship to one's experience, including the parts of you that you might feel are destructive or problematic. In fact, those are often the parts that need the most love, compassion and care in order to not be destructive and problematic. This doesn't mean you give those parts free reign to act how that, however they wish to act.

We all know how that can be problematic. But it does mean we take the time to learn about and understand the positive intention of these parts, fear, anger, and create an internal space where all of our parts can collaborate as a team to respond most appropriately to what's arising in this moment. I want to acknowledge that it can be true that suppression of these seemingly problematic and destructive parts, like the part that might say I'm a failure, or I shouldn't even try, or I hate this person. I need to yell at them. This can be useful, perhaps as an in the moment strategy for reducing the negative impact of these parts on yourself and others around you, but it also seems to be the case that you can manage these parts in a similar, if not more effective and often more effective way in the moment through compassion and internal conversation.

And meeting these parts with a loving attitude of, oh, you know, what's coming up for you right now. Is there a different way that we can respond? What are you trying to accomplish with this? And when we do this, it doesn't come with the longterm consequences of suppression of our internal experience and all this internal opposition that we end up feeling when we're trying to fight our experience, which often leads us to do a lot of projection onto other people, leads to spontaneous outbursts of destructive energy and it leads to this feeling of being internally fractured, that there's parts of me that are okay to experience and other parts that are not okay that I have to push aside. That's not the experience of wholeness. And when we're talking about mindfulness and meditation and also internal freedom, we're talking about creating a space where the fullness of you can exist within awareness so that we're not creating this external tension. Again, it doesn't mean that all those parts have to come through in every moment.

It just means that we're developing a friendship with those parts, talking with them honestly and compassionately, and seeing how they can be used effectively in moments where they are needed and how they might be able to take a back seat when they're not needed. That can be done with kindness, with love rather than fear and hatred. So hope you can continue to integrate that into your practice and especially in your day to day relationship with yourself. It's very important in my opinion. Thank you for your practice.

Let's settle in for today's meditation.