Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. So there's a famous quote you might've heard by the poet Rumi. The wound is the place where the light enters. So this quite beautifully captures the potential we all have to use moments of difficulty and suffering to propel our awakening and our personal growth. You know, as much as we may not like this, none of us are immune to the speed bumps of life.

You know, we have heartbreaks, we have health problems, failures and financial losses, and we have wounds and we have weaknesses. And all of this is just part of this beautiful, messy thing we call human life. But what you do with the challenges and problems that you face when they arise, will determine whether you come out the other side feeling diminished and discouraged or emerge with more wisdom inner strength and presence than ever before. So what I've discovered is that as long as you remember these two key principles I'm going to share with you, your problems can become portals to a more rich, full and meaningful life. So the first principle is to reframe.

So you can reframe the way you view your difficulties and problems. You know so often when life doesn't match our idea of how we think it should be, we feel that life itself is somehow going wrong. You know, we don't want what is happening and that resistance that we have to, what is then generate fear, stress, and suffering. So our problem kind of becomes this enemy that we want to get rid of, but I invite you to examine this kind of basic assumption that life should always be comfortable and pleasant and turn out the way that we want it to. Because that one assumption I see causing endless suffering for people.

Instead, I invite you to see your times of struggle as quite a natural and normal and inevitable part of being human. Now, this is not to diminish in any way, the reality of the pain you might be going through, but rather it's just to kind of open us up to the fact that pain and difficulty happen to all of us on this human journey. So the second principle is to turn towards what's happening rather than away from it. So if we can develop our ability to gently and compassionately turn towards and reflect on our problems and pain as they're happening, rather than avoiding them and running from them, it leads to rapid learning, growth and evolution. So by facing our problems, we gather more information about what's happening and then we can respond more wisely.

So we can ask ourselves, how can I grow through this? What can I learn from what's happening here? And we can also reflect on who we'd like to be in those hard times, how we want to act. Now most people do have a tough time reflecting when they're right in the pain. And sometimes that means they miss out on the reflections that, that could be provided, the lessons that could be provided. But if you can reflect what, if you can reflect while you're in a pain, that's great, but it's often a little bit too much to ask. If you can remember to reflect after it passes, that's really valuable too.

The challenges you're going to face can test and strengthen you. And the more you learn and evolve through them, the more effectively you'll be able to work with life's problems when they arise. And eventually what once seemed impossible to bear become simple and easful. So by applying these two principles, you can turn your deepest pain and your biggest problems into your greatest source of evolution, growth, and awakening.