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How to Meditate: Meditation 101 for Beginners
10 Science-Backed Benefits of Meditation
What is Meditation?
How to Meditate: Meditation 101 for Beginners
10 Science-Backed Benefits of Meditation
What is Meditation?
Benefits of Mindfulness: Mindful Living Can Change Your Life
Mindfulness 101: A Beginner's Guide
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Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness.
Today I'm going to talk
about liking and disliking.
So when we're going about daily
life, the mind tends to constantly
categorize our experience into
good and bad, like and dislike.
Now, this is something that
happens mostly unconsciously.
For instance, we like one
coworker, we dislike another.
We like Friday afternoons, but
we dislike Monday mornings.
We like the drive to the beach,
but we dislike the drive to work.
We like the sound of the birds
in the morning, but not the
sound of our neighbor's dog.
Now, while it's natural for us, from
an evolutionary perspective, to like
some things like a warm, safe shelter
or sweet food and to dislike other
things like shivering from the cold.
Many things that we experience
in life are actually not
inherently unpleasant or pleasant.
We just experienced them that
way because of our own judgments.
So for example, whether you're driving
to the beach or you're driving to
work, your actual driving experience
could be pretty much the same, but
your view of it can totally change
your experience and your mood.
If you like it, you
experience it as pleasant.
And if you decide you don't
like the drive, it can become
kind of like a burdensome chore.
I once had a lady on retreat with
me who said that she hated porridge.
And the thing is that we were getting
served porridge every single morning.
So she found herself getting
really, really irritated.
But then she reported on
day four of the retreat.
She decided to try the
porridge without judgment.
And she said that she actually tasted
it in that moment for the first time
and she found it was actually quite
enjoyable when she let go of the judgment.
I've actually been joking about
this in retreats ever since.
In the same way this lady was becoming
irritated by her judgment that the
porridge was bad, we can make daily
life much more difficult than it
needs to be when we keep judging
things as bad or disliking them.
So as soon as we do that, I often say,
you know, we put crap colored lenses
on, the opposite of rose colored ones.
And we experience lots of things as
more unpleasant than they actually are.
So the invitation today is to
try seeing and experiencing
things without the judgments.
So this can be challenging, but just
aiming to be curious and open-minded to
what it might be like to experience what's
there beyond the judgments in the mind.
So as an experiment, try letting
go of judgment in moments where you
might normally find dislike arising.
A red light, a slow car, a loud noise,
a certain person, a long line - in
those moments, experiment with seeing
how it feels to let go of all of your
preferences and judgements altogether.
I think you'll find that when you
let go of those judgments, you
also let go of a lot of reactivity,
stress and suffering and make space
for more inner peace to emerge.
As always, thank you for your
practice and your presence here.
And let's settle in
for today's meditation.
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