Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today we're going to talk about how we can heal our insecurities. Now, some people seem really confident, right? Like you might look at people on social media looking really happy and self-assured, and you would think to yourself that they just don't experience any sense of insecurity at all. But if we look a little closer, we see the same vulnerabilities and insecurities exist within all of us. And the reason for this basic insecurity just has to do with the way our mind evolved.

So we have the same basic needs is every other animal on the planet, food, water, shelter, reproduction, but none of those things matter if you die, right? So what's the number one job of the human mind? It's to stop you from dying. And here's the thing, for humans in more primitive times, fitting in with the tribe or the group was absolutely a survival need. Humans did not survive alone. They only survived in packs. So if you got kicked out of the group, if you got rejected, you're pretty much, that pretty much means certain death.

Rejection meant death. So if you ever noticed that rejection feels like death? This is why. So, how does the mind go about making sure that you always fit in with the pack? Well, it compares you to everybody else and assesses, you know. Do they like me and my fitting in, am I doing the right thing? Am I contributing enough? Am I offending anyone? Am I good enough? Does any of this sound familiar at all? You know, these days our minds are still doing the same thing, comparing us to other people, assessing whether we're measuring up, fitting, in doing anything that could get us rejected or have people look down on us. And to make matters a lot worse these days, instead of just comparing ourselves to people in just our tribe, thanks to the media and the internet, your mind is now comparing you to a massive amount of people in often in glossy photo-shopped, you know, pictures.

So this constant comparison to so many other members of the tribe at such impossible standards, really aggravates the conditioning of the human mind and makes a lot of us feel, quite frankly, that we're not good enough. And this has a lot to do with the huge rise in depression across the world in recent years. So what we're doing through mindfulness is we're learning not to get rid of thoughts and feelings of insecurity. This is actually obviously very deep conditioning of the mind and it will likely always be there, but instead we're changing the way we relate to those thoughts and feelings. We're learning to meet the insecurity with kindness and understanding and wisdom, just seeing it for what it is.

Some old conditioning in the mind doesn't mean anything about your actual worth. Of course it doesn't. So these patterns of insecurity, they kind of just become eventually words and feelings that pass through the mind, rather than something that controls you, hurts you or limits you. So as much as possible, rather than believing in those thoughts of deficiency or feelings of unworthiness, see if you can take a step back and rest in the wholeness and the enoughness at the heart of who you are. So I'll be guiding you through more on how to let go of unhelpful thoughts in today's meditation.

So, as always thank you for your practice and for your presence here. And I invite you to settle in for today's practice.