Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, we're exploring one of the essential attitudinal foundations of mindfulness, non-striving. So non-striving is often a tricky concept for Westerners to grasp because from childhood, most of us have been trained to achieve, set goals, be competitive, aim for success and keep moving forward. Now what happens is in today's world, we tend to have these long to-do lists and huge calendars and, and quite a big kind of daily pressure to succeed. So it's really easy to find ourselves rushing through our days, our weeks, our years, without being present enough to truly live them.

So meditation is this one time in our lives where we can completely let go of any striving towards getting anywhere else, but where we are in just that moment. We're not trying to make anything happen, we're not trying to fix anything, solve anything, become anything, or change anything at all. And contrary to many misconceptions about mindfulness, we're not trying to get into any special state of mind. In fact, from the perspective of mindfulness, every state is a special state and every moment is a special moment, no matter what's arising. So part of non-striving means we can finally let go of trying to become something better and allow ourselves to just rest in being just as we are.

So we're learning to allow the flow of life to unfold, letting it be as it is without having any agenda to change it or wishing it was different. So it turns out that this kind of letting go into non-striving is incredibly and deeply healing and rejuvenating, because many of us live our lives with minds that are just spinning all the time with so many agendas and desires. So we're often living our moments as a means to an end toward some better future. You know, we're craving something more, to be more, achieve more, get more, have more, or we're trying to escape or push something away. And when the mind is spinning with all of that, it's really easy actually to become stressed, distracted, and tense.

So when we let go of striving and relax into mindfulness, we can finally just be fully alive and fully open to the kind of richness and beauty of what's already here. And it's such a relief to let go and just be. Now, of course, this way of being, this non-striving can flow into our daily life too. It doesn't mean you can't get things done in life. On the contrary, in this state of being when you're fully present, you can do what needs to be done in your life from a place of clear-headed mindful awareness.

And you're doing will have so much of a new quality of it when it comes from a state of non-striving. So if you care to, now let's practice meditation together and give ourselves the rare and precious gift of some time to simply be.