Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to talk about playful curiosity. Eckhart Tolle once said, "Life is not as serious as the mind makes it out to be." And that is true. When we we're children, most of us kind of knew this, right? We never took ourselves or our life too seriously. We had this innate curiosity about everything, playfulness towards life.

We approached life with very little fear or self-consciousness. What mattered, a lot of the time, was just exploring, discovering, and just having fun moment by moment. As we get older, things seem to change. We tend to lose all of that and we do start to take life really seriously, and a kind of heaviness can set into the mind. And we can bring that heaviness into our mindfulness practice too, and into our personal growth journey.

And while it's true, on the one hand, that looking deeply within and understanding ourselves is a serious thing in the sense that our ability to be happy and live in harmony with the world and with others really does depend on having a healthy mind. But on the other hand, if we approach mindfulness too seriously, it just becomes really difficult. If we can bring back into our lives that attitude of playful curiosity, if we can bring that especially into our practice and into our approach to watching the mind, then things start to shift. Because if we can smile at the mind and be playful and friendly towards it, we can relax more and not take things too personally. Bringing in more light hearted energy really helps us to get a bit of space and perspective.

When I teach retreats, I often invite people to take the attitude of an explorer or an adventure. Almost, I say to them, it's almost like being a wildlife photographer, tracking some fascinating creature when we watch the mind, to have this attitude of kind of sitting back and just watching the antics of the mind and not getting too worried about it or caught up in it. Just being curious, open and observing. Also being open to playing with the mind to see how our mindfulness skills can potentially change or affects things. And, you know, when we practice that skill, really being curious about the effect.

So trying different things out in the laboratory of your life. I like the term the monkey mind that people use sometimes. It reminds us to kind of almost view the mind as this innocent, naughty creature that doesn't really know any better and just needs a bit of training. It's kind of like, you know, having this attitude of, oh my gosh, what is the monkey mind getting up to in there today? And just of kind of smiling at the mind and then lovingly using our mindfulness skills to train it to be healthier, more balanced and happy. So if we can have this light, easygoing relationship with the mind, then mindfulness becomes a lot more joyful, uplifting and nourishing.

So my invitation for today. Bring an attitude of playful curiosity into your mindfulness practice and into your life. And then see what effect that has on you and on your practice. We'll be playing with this a little bit more in today's meditation. So I invite you to settle in for that.

And as always, thank you for your practice.