Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about trusting your past self. So we often hear about our future selves, creating a future vision for yourself that inspires growth and excitement. But there's less discussion about our past self. It tends to be something that we condemn or we view as a less evolved part of us.

But I think this can get problematic in post important decision-making so I'll explain what I mean by that. Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to make an important decision, maybe a job you needed to leave, a relationship you needed to change or any decision that was difficult, but you knew something needed to shift? And you made that decision, whatever it needed to be. But then a week goes by, a month that goes by, a year, a year, goes by and things in your life aren't quite where you want them to be yet. And it causes you to reflect back to that moment and say, what was I thinking? Did I make the wrong decision? Maybe I should've stayed there. I don't know if that was right.

The tendency in these moments is to look back to what was good. Sometimes it's an honest reflection. Sometimes it's a distorted memory of what was good, but we tend to focus on what was in that situation that we feel like we're lacking now. It could be a sense of security that we had, stability, some joy that we had then but don't yet have now. And it can create this extra tension in our present moment experience because we're not trusting our past self.

And that's where I want to offer a different invitation, that it's okay and important to trust your past self. To trust that, in that moment, given the resources and the understanding you had, and the gut instinct you felt that said something needs to shift, that was a form of wisdom that needed to be trusted. It's a form of intuitive guidance that, in many ways, is all we really have in each moment. And when it comes to this moment to moment assessment of what is true, what is needed, there's a felt sense we have, a felt sense we have in each moment that we often forget when reflecting in hindsight, especially when things aren't quite yet where we want them to be, or maybe have expected them to be. So my invitation to you today, and maybe again for the rest of your life, is to trust your past self.

It did what it needed to do in that moment. It did what it was able to do. And what its particular karmic path was, and where it was taking it, you're still on that path. Trust the unfolding. The story has yet to complete.

Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.