Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about letting go of limiting thoughts and beliefs. So I'm going to invite you to consider a metaphor for this. Have you ever had the experience of someone coming to your front door to sell you something? It, maybe some of you who are younger won't have experienced this, but for those who grew up pre-internet days, and I might be showing my age here, people used to come knocking at the door, selling things. Maybe they'd sell encyclopedias or vacuum or some makeup.

So somebody would come to your front door and they would start their sales pitch, right? Could I interest you in this vacuum cleaner? How's your normal one operating? You could probably upgrade it and your floors will look amazing. So, now, I never bought anything from a door to door salesman. I would just really simply and politely say, no, thanks and just wish them well on their way. And in some ways this offers a really nice metaphor for how our minds generate these ideas and beliefs trying to kind of get us to buy into something. These thoughts come knocking at the door of our awareness and try to kind of give us their sales pitches of beliefs and judgments and opinions.

Now if a door to door salesman came with his vacuum and he started his sales pitch to you, it's really unlikely that you would just yell, take my money I'm in without actually listening to the rest of his pitch. But this is often what we do with limiting beliefs and thoughts. We just buy into them immediately without much consideration. So with our minds, when they come to the door of our awareness, you know, we can hear that sales pitch and just kind of politely say, no, thanks mind, and just leave it at that. Now I don't mean to say that we should try and push the thought away or block it out.

What I'm saying is that we can just know that our mind is a thought generating machine. It's constantly chatting away and pitching us all kinds of things. It wants us to believe in. But we don't have to buy them. That's a choice we have.

If we do buy into everything, we might end up with a mental house full of junk and clutter that weighs us down and makes us suffer. So we can become a little bit more discerning with what beliefs and thoughts we buy into. And when we hear one that's not helpful, we can simply smile kind of at the mind politely and just mentally say no, thanks mind. So to be clear again, we don't have to get rid of the thought. We simply don't buy into it.

So today, as you go about your day, just remembering, you don't have to buy into everything the mind tries to sell you. May be a good sales pitch, but if you don't find it useful, you can just kind of mentally smile to yourself and say, no, thanks mind. And then just put your attention back onto something more nourishing. In this way, you have a clearer, lighter mind and heart and more ease and awareness throughout the day. So as always thank you for your practice and your presence here and just inviting you now to settle in for today's meditation.