The True Rewards of Practice

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to talk about the true rewards of mindfulness practice. So I think we can kind of get to thinking sometimes that if we're living with awareness and compassion, that life's just going to run smoothly and things will go the way that we're planning them to ,life won't be messy anymore or difficult anymore. We might even kind of have this feeling that we deserve for this to be the case. But it's not really the way that human life works.

You know, the nature of the human condition is that we experience pain and difficulty as well as pleasure and ease. We experience highs and lows, failures and successes, conflict and peace, regret, hope, sadness, happiness. Mindfulness is not a magic pill that just takes away all the difficult stuff in our lives. It doesn't give us, you know, a reward in that particular way. Now, of course, it's absolutely true that life tends to be a lot more balanced, harmonious, and fulfilling when we're practicing mindful living.

But we still will at times, experience things like sickness, unfairness, struggles and we'll experience that as well as wellbeing, beauty, and joy. There'll be dark times, there'll be light times and there'll be every single shade in between because all of that is part of the richness, the variety and the color of the human experience. And that's okay, because the reality is we're not practicing mindfulness to try and control all the conditions of our life. We're practicing so that we can meet all of these conditions with dignity, with wisdom and with kindness. And we're not trying to rise above anything in life, rather we practice so that we can be more fully awake, engaged, and in love with our life.

And we practice to touch the wholeness, the goodness, and the oneness of our true nature and what could be more rewarding than that. So as always thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And inviting you now to begin to settle in for today's meditation.