Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'd like to address one of the most common questions that I get asked when I teach retreats and that is, will I lose my motivation to reach my goals if I meditate a lot? Will I lose my edge, my passion for life? So, often when I ask people questions about why they think that that might happen, what I hear is that the concern is, is that if we're always bringing our attention back to the present moment that we're going to somehow totally lose touch with our goals, our dreams, our values, and our visions for the future. Or that meditating will lead to a state where we're kind of checked out of life, so those things weren't really matter anymore and they're afraid to go there. So neither of these is the case. Absolutely not the case.

So when we allow ourselves to be fully present in the moment we're not forgetting about or deleting our past, are we? It doesn't vanish. It's always available to us. It's always a part of us and we can recall it whenever we need it. In the same way, we're also definitely not abandoning the future. We're simply making our primary focus, inhabiting our actual moment to moment experience instead of being lost in our wandering thoughts.

So we're not negating or denying our visions for the future at all. On the contrary, we can still plan for our future whilst being fully present in the now. And when we do that, we do it with much more clarity and discernment. The difference is that we're not lost in thoughts about the future, and we're not clinging to them. We're fully aware of what we're doing in the moment.

We are, we can be aware that we're planning for the future. So in other words, when we're fully present, we can use our mind instead of being lost in it. So I'll also add that if anything, mindfulness actually gives you more of an edge and more passion and motivation because you get very, very clear on what matters to you deep in your heart. You get very connected to what you care about, and that makes you very passionate and motivated to be engaged in the things that matter to you. Whether it's raising your kids, serving people at work, building a business, or doing a hobby.

Essentially mindfulness is really about waking up. And that means being more engaged with life, more alive to it all, more present for it all. This kind of wakefulness and engagement in life was summed up really beautifully by Jon Kabat-Zinn when he said, "Ultimately, I've come to see that meditation is nothing short of a love affair with life." So I would say that mindfulness does the exact opposite, and this is true in my experience, of making you lose your edge and engagement in life, because when you're not so lost in your wandering thoughts all the time, when you're not lost on autopilot mode, you can get back in the driver's seat of your life, live it with more intention and clarity and be more fully awake for the whole moment by moment adventure of it. So as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us in this community. And let's settle in now for today's meditation.