Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about hidden growth. So when we began practicing mindfulness, we're often so caught up in our minds that we don't actually realize that we're caught up in our minds. And we're often also really unaware of a lot of our unhelpful patterns or areas where we're stuck inside. But after we've been practicing mindfulness for some time, we begin to grow in our capacity to be aware.

So, what that means though, is that we begin to be much more able to step back from the mind, step back from our emotions, and then we can see all of our own patterns and our personality much more clearly. But this isn't always easy. One of the challenges with this kind of growth is that people often mistake this growing awareness for a decline in awareness. And the reason for this is because all of a sudden we're very aware of how much our mind is wandering. We're very aware of when we're emotionally triggered.

We're more aware of the places inside where we're wounded, constricted or holding back. Whereas before, we were unaware of all of that. So there can be this feeling, right, that you're going backwards when you're actually going forwards. In yoga, they have a metaphor for growing awareness. They talk about a snake going into a hollow piece of bamboo.

Once it goes in, there's only one way out. It can only go forward. It can't go backwards. And this is a little bit like how awareness training works. Once you can see that you can step back from thoughts and feelings and abide in awareness, in a way there's no going back.

Because once we've experienced for ourselves that we're not our thoughts and emotions, once we know that we can let them go and just stabilize in that awareness, that inner freedom, we're always going to be aware of that on some level. We can't un-know it. And that's a really the powerful thing, because once you have a taste of that kind of inner freedom, there's always going to be that longing to return to it. So, although sometimes on the path of mindfulness, you might feel like you're going backwards, you might feel like you're really face-to-face with all of your stuff, you may well, in that moment, be surging forwards into new levels of awareness and personal growth. And although it might be uncomfortable and scary and you might even feel the urge to run away, just seeing if you can remember to trust the practice and the process of awareness training, because it always leads in one general direction - towards more wholeness, fulfillment, compassion, and inner freedom.

So as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And inviting you now to settle in for today's meditation.