Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about how seeing is freeing. So if we train in awareness, which is what mindfulness is all about, then were becoming more aware of everything. We're becoming more aware of our thoughts, our feelings, our impulses, our urges and the effects of our actions. So we become more aware of not only the things we like, the pleasant things, but also stuff that we don't like, the, the unpleasant things.

So while it might seem a little bit counterintuitive to become more aware of things we don't like, it's actually this awareness that sets us free. The seeing is freeing. And when we start out with mindfulness, we tend to often be so identified with our thoughts, so caught up in them, we don't even know where caught up. It's almost like a bit of a trance or a hypnosis. And when we're in that unawareness, our thoughts completely hook us and we tend to get kind of pulled around into emotional reactivity, old habits and limited thinking.

Once we've learned to step back from thoughts and into a greater awareness, life will never be the same again because we're waking up out of that hypnotic effect that the thoughts can have over us. And once that process begins, there really is no going back. That's because I think, you know, once we understand that our thoughts are simply stories in the mind and we get a taste of the freedom and inner wellbeing that comes from that understanding, the common, natural response is to want more of that freedom and ease. It's kind of the same with our emotions, our impulses, our habits, our old conditioning. The more awareness we have of them, the less we get pulled around by them, the less we get hijacked by them, the more we're able to respond instead of reacting, the more we're able to choose deliberately who we want to be and how we want to be in any given moment.

Awareness wakes us up to new levels of clarity, wisdom, and inner freedom. And that's a really powerful thing. Sometimes we can be tempted to want to run away from seeing or being with certain aspects of ourselves. Sometimes we're afraid to, but just remember that, even though it's sometimes a little uncomfortable, this process of waking up, it does free us from being overwhelmed by our emotions and urges, and eventually can completely and radically transform the mind and therefore our lives. So the simple invitation for today is simply to remember, that no matter what arises to remember that the seeing is freeing.

So as always thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And now let's settle in for today's meditation.