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.