Give Up to the Truth

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about the power of accepting the truth of our life just as it is. So when we try to resist or try to escape certain aspects of ourselves or our life, we reject life as it is in the moment. And this only creates a lot of discord and suffering in the mind. In fact, I would go as far as to say that most of our stress and our inner struggles come from an inner resistance to life.

And mindfulness gives us a way to examine and soften this resistance. We start to see how often we're trying to push away certain thoughts, feelings, or experiences. And by pushing away, I mean, we're struggling against them, we're wishing or wanting for things to be different than they are quite continuously. So mindful acceptance, on the other hand, simply means you give up to the truth of life as it is in that moment, no matter what it is. What this doesn't mean is that you have to like it.

It simply means that you allow things to just be as they are. For example, I don't like the fact that climate change is happening. I don't like the fact that my body is aging. Nor do I like the fact that there are people living in poverty or that I've made mistakes in my life that have hurt people. But the facts of life simply are the way they are.

And an acceptance of that grounds us in reality, which is where we need to start from if we want to then create change to make things better. A metaphor for the difference between acceptance and resistance. Imagine you're on a walk and unexpectedly, it starts raining. Now you can keep walking while you're in resistance. So perhaps you're thinking to yourself, gosh, this sucks.

I hate this. Why me? And so you can be in a bad mood for the rest of your walk. Or you can simply accept the truth of that situation. It's raining and you're getting wet and you can make peace with that. Now from there, you can choose perhaps to change things.

You might seek shelter, you might decide to walk faster so you can find some cover or you might just decide it's fine to get wet. Whatever you choose though, you're in a basic mindset of acceptance of what is. Acceptance, hopefully you can see from this metaphor, is a much more empowered wise and peaceful way of navigating life. So my invitation to you today and ongoing is to see if you can bring more acceptance into your life. How? First, just recognize what you're not accepting.

Perhaps it's your body, your partner, your finances, a mistake you made, or, you know, something like that, that something that's true about the world, perhaps, your body or your mind. The invitation is to simply give up the fight with the way it is. And this usually brings an immediate sense of ease and softening and a kind of clarity of mind. Then if needed, you can work with the situation to change things. But you can do it from a state of being at peace rather than at war with the way things are.

Wishing you a wonderful practice with this. And as always thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And let's now settle in for today's meditation.