Hi, welcome back to

your Daily Mindfulness.

In today's session, I want

to talk about feeling good.

So I'll start with a provocative, but

perhaps intuitive statement, which is that

everything is easier when you feel good.

We tend to be more

patient when we feel good.

We tend to feel like we have more

energy for life when we feel good.

We tend to feel like more of our

best selves when we feel good.

Feeling good is important.

And I do think it's something

that we should try to

cultivate more of in our life.

Now a lot of times we go about

feeling good in destructive ways.

We might use substances to get there

or we might use short, quick fixes

to try to feel good in the moment,

but it has long-term consequences.

So one longer term, sustainable way to

feel good is to start meditating, which

we do a lot of here at Mindfulness.com.

But the interesting thing about meditation

and its relationship to feeling good is

that, in order to meditate, you actually

have to stop trying to feel good.

And what I mean by that is that it's

often our attachment to feeling a certain

way in the meditation that actually

gets in the way of the meditation,

because the orientation where often

taking in most forms of meditation,

especially mindfulness meditation, is

allowing this moment to be here as it

is without pushing against everything

we don't like, without trying to

grasp all the things that we do want.

Both of that, right, the pushing and the

pulling, these are just more forms of

tension that we create in relationship

to the experience that's arising.

And so in many ways, meditation is the

process of no longer trying to feel good.

But it's also the process of no

longer trying not to not feel good.

It's making space for

what is here within us.

But the cool thing about that is when

we inhabit that relationship to our

experience, there's a spaciousness, an

ease, something in us gets to relax.

And that orientation to our

experience is inherently pleasant.

It brings a natural kind of

joy and clarity and ease.

So let's sum this up in three lines.

Everything is easier when you feel good.

To feel good, just start meditating.

And to meditate, just

stop trying to feel good.

Have some, some fun trying to

contemplate that one today.

Thank you for your practice.

Let's settle in for today's meditation.