Hey, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session we're going to talk about the paradox of invincibility. Although the word invincibility tends to conjure up ideas of a stoic, no pain no-gain mental toughness, or even a pseudo confident pump yourself up mindset. That's not what I'm talking about here. Invincibility, as I define, it is the belief that you can be with and get through whatever comes your way.

And this isn't just any kind of belief. It's an embodied, deep in our bones, unwavering trust that who we are is bigger than the experience of the moment. It's a fearlessness rooted into the core of our being. We don't get this fearlessness from positive thinking. It won't come from reading a personal development book and feeling pumped up and it doesn't come from just trying to be tough.

This belief can only be earned by walking through the fire, allowing ourselves to experience the difficult parts of being human and seeing that we can be with this to. Herein lies our paradox. To cultivate invincibility, we first need to let down our mask of invincibility. To understand how to be with difficult moments and develop a true confidence that we can be with those moments, we need to be vulnerable and courageous enough to stay present to them. Chances are you've already experienced this somewhere in your life.

Maybe you went through something difficult, something so painful that once you were out on the other side, not only self in your heart, but it gave you a new perspective and a sense of resilience for life that I can make it through a lot. Or maybe even the grueling training for a marathon on the other side of that, feeling like, wow, I can handle anything or at least a lot of pain or discomfort that I didn't think I could handle. This is also one of the reasons why meditation is so powerful. It's asking us to be present, which confronts us with many different parts of ourselves, including the painful parts and is encouraging us to stay with it, to soften and soften into it and see that, I can be with this too. So continue to practice this, softening around the resistance.

And keep doing this until your relationship to experience morphs into one of understanding, acceptance and ease. We're doing this in our meditation practice here at Mindfulness.com. And each time you do, each time you show up for all of those parts of yourself and soften into the little discomforts, the pain, or even those parts of you that you might typically resist, you are developing a new kind of invincibility, a belief that you can get through and be with whatever comes your way. And that's a superpower. So thank you for your practice.

I'll talk to you in the meditation and take care.