Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to talk about how to deal with doubt on the path of mindfulness. So as you begin to practice meditation on a regular basis, you may encounter moments of doubt. That's actually really normal. So doubting thoughts may arise like, I don't know if I can even do this practice or is this really doing anything useful for my life or, you know, I don't even know if this is worth the time.

I'm really busy. Now of course, thoughts like this have the potential to actually just stop us from doing our meditation at all. We may not have even gotten to the point of sitting down for our practice yet, and these thoughts are already arising. So this can be a real hindrance to regular practice and can actually stop us from, you know, getting all the benefits that practice offers us. And I think it's worth noting as well that this doesn't just happen for just for beginners.

Even if we've been meditating for years, and even if we know that mindfulness has brought significant benefits into our lives, we can still have moments like this of doubt. In fact, sometimes I think it can even be that we've had deeper layers of doubt, you know, maybe even existential doubts and fears that are coming up in our practice. There can be a real feeling of just like, I don't know if I really want to go any further. And so these thoughts and feelings can really pull at our attention and feel like a block. But I think the main intention to just keep coming back to, is just to treat, these kinds of thoughts and feelings in the same way we treat all thoughts and feelings in our practice.

We simply want to observe them without buying into them. So we don't need to push them away. We don't need to kind of cling on and get swept away by them either. Instead, we just want to see them clearly, let them arise and unfold, and pass in their own time. So just keep meeting what arises with awareness, compassion and steadfastness as best we can.

And when we do that, something really wonderful starts to happen. The doubts usually actually start to dissolve and we're able to open to new depths of insight and presence. So if we can do that, if we can let go of the doubt a little, then we can start to rely more on our firsthand experience of what the effects of meditation do for us in our body, mind, and life. So we can observe firsthand how we feel at the end of each meditation and continue to tune into and acknowledge the effects that mindfulness has in our lives, like feeling a bit less stressed, a bit less reactive, more calm or self-aware. So instead of doubt coming in, we can let our firsthand experience be our guide.

And in this way, we gain greater confidence and trust in the practice. And we can rely on that to keep us steady on the path forward. As always, thank you for your practice and for being here in this community. Let's settle in now for today's meditation.