Hi, welcome back to

your Daily Mindfulness.

In today's session, we're going to talk

about letting go and embracing the new.

A basic tenet of mindfulness meditation is

that in each moment we get to start fresh.

We've never seen this moment before,

and therefore it's a new opportunity

to show up and explore who we are

and who we want to be in this moment.

Of course, the momentum of our

past can certainly influence our

conditioning in the present moment.

But there's something liberating

and powerful when we like all of our

ideas of who we were and where we're

going and just dwell in this moment of

presence as a snapshot of your life,

seemingly independent of everything else.

We can even ask, how do

I want to be right now?

Who do I want to be right now?

What do I want to think?

How do I want to think?

I think for many of us, when we first

get involved in mindfulness, this is

one of the most liberating insights.

We see for the first time that

we have more influence over our

life than we thought we did.

A great training to start to see

this more deeply is through the

practice of following our breath.

The breath is great for this

because it's seemingly the

same experience in each moment.

Although it's always changing and it

has as a beginning, a middle and an end.

So we try to show up and

be as present as we can.

Breathing in, feeling it

fully and then breathing out.

And we give the breath our full

care, presence, compassion.

And then it's gone,

never to come back again.

We can never get that moment

back, that breath or that

access experience it's gone.

So we have to let go of it if

we have any chance of giving our

full presence to the next breath.

And that rarely happens because we're

usually thinking about how crappy our

mindfulness was in the last breath

and why we're no good at meditation

and why even bother focusing on the

breath anyway, since I can't do it.

But we just practice letting

all that go and starting new.

Let it go, start new.

And this training then carries over to our

real life, seeing the beginnings and ends

of each moment, practicing being there

while it's happening and then letting it

go, regardless of what happened before.

The more we do this, the more we see that

each moment truly is a new beginning.

See if you can embody this throughout

your day, both in your meditation

practice and in your daily life.

Thank you for your practice.

I'll talk to you in a

meditation and take care.