Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about how to bring more simplicity and ease into our meditation. So meditation really is very simple and straightforward in its essence. But it's actually often our ideas of how we want it to be or how we think it should be that can make it feel more complex and tricky than it needs to be. So, one thing we often don't realize when we sit down for meditation is that we're often bringing with us a whole lot of expectations.

We can be really prone, for instance, to comparing our present experience with a great meditation we had in the past. So we might also come to our meditation, right, with hopes that our mind will go into a certain kind of state. We have ideas about what a good meditation or a bad meditation is. So we kind of just have an agenda. We want things to be a certain way.

But ultimately it's the same approach that's needed in each practice. We just want to have an attitude of curiosity, acceptance and warmth towards whatever arises. And then to simply notice when the mind has wandered, acknowledge it, let it go and gently bring our attention back to the object of focus. That's it. We really can keep the practice really simple and easy like that.

Now in saying that, of course, every meditation is going to be unique. Sometimes the mind is going to feel really calm and there'll be other days when the mind is going to feel really agitated. Some days, the mind will not wander very much, other days you might need to bring the mind back a hundred times. No problem either way. So when meditation doesn't turn out to be how we thought it should be, a thought might arise in the mind like this meditation isn't going well, or I'm just not a good meditator, or we find ourselves getting frustrated or disappointed.

But we approach all of these situations exactly the same each time. It doesn't require a different approach. We just want to have that attitude of curiosity, acceptance and warmth towards whatever's arising. Notice when the mind has wandered, acknowledge it, let it go, come back to the object of focus. If the mind stays busy, that's okay.

If there are tricky emotions arising or judgments, that's okay. So we work with the conditions that are present in that moment without any judgment. So the invitation for practice today is to see if you can let go of any fixed ideas about how your meditation should be. Let go of any expectations or judgments and just keep the practice simple and easy. Just showing up with curiosity, acceptance, and warmth.

Noticing, acknowledging, letting go, then gently coming back to rest in presence again and again and again. So let's settle in now for today's meditation. And as always thank you for your practice and your presence here with us.