Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to explore the question, whose thoughts are you thinking? So for most of us, as we live day-to-day life, we tend to think of ourselves in a certain way. We think about life in a certain way. So we have our beliefs, our opinions, our judgments, our viewpoints, and our fixed ideas. And some of it, we may have picked up from childhood.

Some ideas we carry around were picked up from our culture, our time period in history, some from our peers or our particular place that we live in. So how we dress, how we speak, the daily choices we make and the goals we have, so much of this can be shaped by the people and the influences around us. Now while it's totally natural for us to have conditioning in the mind. It's very useful to see that some of that conditioning is helpful and some of it can actually be really unhelpful. And our task is to discern the difference and then let go of what no longer serves us.

For an example here, if your parents expected you to be a doctor or a lawyer, And you're carrying around their thoughts, their expectations, even though what you want to be as an artist, then you might end up miserable. If you picked up messages from mainstream culture and you're carrying around these ideas that you have to be a huge success, be famous and wealthy before you can feel like you're enough, then you might always feel deficient. If you're carrying around conditioned thinking about your agenda, your lifestyle, your body, your self worth, about money or spirituality, or about your identity, that you picked up long ago that's actually holding you back from being authentically you and authentically happy, then it's useful to see clearly what's not yours to carry anymore. And we can become very invested in maintaining the storylines and conditioning in the mind because they can really feel part of our identity. So it's not always easy to let them go, but our ability to live the life, that's really true to us depends on our willingness, our sense of courage to let that go and put down the old storylines.

So today I invite you to notice as much as you can, if any unhelpful conditioning is playing out. And asking yourself whose thoughts am I thinking? And if they don't feel helpful to you, they don't truly belong to you. So see if you can play with letting them go and instead trusting your own inner authority as the ultimate guide for your life. I hope you enjoy this practice. It can be really quite liberating and empowering.

And as always thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And now inviting you to begin to settle in for today's meditation.