Hey! Welcome back to your daily mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about letting go and its role in navigating uncertain times. Whenever I think of letting go, it brings to mind this, yeah, well, painful story that I heard about how poachers use to catch monkeys in India. What they do is take a coconut, cut it in half, hollow out one side and drill a hole in it. Then they wire that down to a tree and put a banana on the other side.

Then they would hide. The monkey would come up, smell the banana, stick its hand through to grab it. But as soon as it grabbed it, the whole was not big enough to pull the hand out. So it would pull, pull, pull. But of course, will get stuck.

All the monkey had to do was let go of the banana. But it really wants this thing. It's, it's committed to what it came here for. I'm here for. Eventually, the poachers see the monkey and they start walking over.

The monkey pulls, trying to get away, but doesn't let go. And eventually, the poachers just pick the monkey up and put it in a cage. All the while, all the monkey needed to do was let go of the banana. But it's holding on is what led to its own demise. So notice how that story lands for you.

I know I certainly have my own experiences of, of holding on, thinking that it was leading to happiness or what I wanted, but was actually getting in the way. When it comes to uncertain times, difficult experiences, it means we're going through a change. Something is shifting in our life and we're moving into a new experience. It will require new inner resources from us, new ways of thinking, new beliefs, and adapting to new circumstances. As you're going through whatever it is you're going through right now, notice if there's a holding on to the way things once were.

And if that holding on is actually creating a lot of extra suffering for you. In our meditation today, we will explore what it might be like to take a more spacious relationship to what's happening, to maybe start to let go of some of that gripping to the banana, like the monkey. It can be painful and it can be scary. There's a reason we're holding on. We fear the unknown, but letting go allows us to start to move to a new reality.

Embrace what is here and find peace in that new reality. And that's a part of the change and the transformation we're going through. So, well, explore more of this in the meditation. I just want to say again, well done for continuing to show up and especially to day three, it means you haven't given up and it means you still have hope. So I'm proud of you.

We'll get through this and I'll talk to you in a bit in the meditation. Thank you for your practice and take care.