Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about getting back in alignment with yourself. So I'd like to start with a potentially provocative statement. Sometimes we need to get out of alignment with the rest of the world to get back into alignment with ourselves. Sometimes we need to get out of alignment with the rest of the world to get back into alignment with ourselves.

So, if you think about how we can get out of alignment with ourselves, it's often because we're following someone else's wisdom, truth or advice. This can happen from a very early age with messages were given in childhood from our parents, the people around us that tell us who we should be, how we should act, what we should say, what we shouldn't say. And all of this, in many sense, we can be completely forgiven for it because it's how we get through life. It's how we learn. It's how we meet the environment around us.

It's how we find a sense of safety, a sense of love. But as we move into adulthood and we start to really reconnect with ourselves and our voice and a sense of independence and who we want to be in the world, it does require getting out of alignment with a lot of what was told to us that wasn't actually ours. It was someone else's. It was culture's., and that can happen in childhood, but it can continue into adulthood where we're given all of these different messages from maybe the people we work with, or still from family members or friends, our social groups. And this is why there's a good argument to be made that getting it out, getting out of alignment with all of these people and all of these messages and all of these ideas can actually be essential to getting back into alignment with yourself, for really learning how to listen to yourself and that soft pulse of truth that we all have moving through us, but often gets clouded when we're inundated with other people's ideas, stories and judgements.

So more than anything, today's session is about, hopefully, giving yourself permission to get out of alignment with others. And only if you're feeling that call. It may be that you actually feel in alignment with yourself when you're with other people, when you're with the world around you. But I know for myself and for many others, there's often the sense of having to conform to the space around us can actually get us further disconnected from ourselves. So I hope this gives you the permission to take some time away.

It could be periods throughout the day, or it could just be a general sense of, you know what, I'm not going to abide by this idea or that idea, or everyone's doing this right now and I'm actually going to do this for myself. I'm going to listen to myself and really start to honor that pulse of truth that is moving through you moment by moment by moment. That's how we come back into alignment with ourselves. And then we can come back into the rest of the world with a stronger sense of who we are. So hope this gives you something to think about.

Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.