The Truth of Enlightenment

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I'm going to read you an excerpt from my book, Stop Missing Your Life, How to be Deeply Present in an Unpresent World. And we're going to talk about how this relates to the experience of wholeness and moving toward more wholeness. So in the introduction I write, "I want us to see how, if we're always fighting, what is present, not liking ourselves for what we feel when we pay attention to what we're feeling or denying ourselves a moment of sadness in an effort to supplant it with joy, then we're setting ourselves up for a lifetime of tension. Life's full range of experiences, the joy sadness, confusion never go away.

And the deepest enlightenment doesn't change any of that. Instead we find more peace and ease being with the continuous flow of it, all, understanding that all of these parts of us contribute to the whole of who we are." So just notice what it's like to hear those words. I think sometimes on the journey of personal development and even the journey of mindfulness, there can be this feeling of becoming some better version of ourselves, trying to become some better version of ourselves. And while it's true that we are going into this with the intention often for growth and to improve some aspect of our life, it's not as though the enlightened endpoint that we're getting to will be with the exclusion of all of these different experiences, like discomfort or confusion or sadness. These are part of what it means to yo be human.

The thing that shifts though, is that our mind expands enough to be able to hold all of these dimensions within ourselves without constantly creating excess tension by pushing them away, fighting them or taking them so personally. So I hope this is a reminder for you on your own mindfulness journey, that when you find yourself caught up in this, Oh, I don't like this. Trying to push it away in order to get to some enlightened state. Remember that, that experience that we're going for happens by welcoming all of these different parts of us and learning to be grounded and at peace with them. So thank you for your practice.

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