Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about inner peace. Now these days as practices of meditation and mindfulness have come up as things that are important for our health and wellbeing and our productivity, and just being a full human in the world. And it's widely understood that that's the case. It can easily become, you know, another to do.

And inner peace can become another to do. Something that we're, we're chasing, we're trying to get to. But it's really important to remember that inner peace is not something you can chase. It's only something that you can get when you stop running. Inner peace is not something you can chase.

It's only something you can get when you stop running, because it can't come from trying to get somewhere else. It comes from trying to get more here, relaxing into this moment, settling into yourself and making space for the many dimensions that come with being human. The idea of chasing inner peace or trying to get to inner peace is in some way, a resistance or denial to what is actually true right now. And the only way we come to a peace within ourselves is to meet what is true and learn to relax into it. It's not some organization of the internal variables or the external variables of life that when all of that comes together, then I could finally be peaceful with my life.

It doesn't work like that. There's always going to be thoughts. Some of them are going to be difficult and complicated. There's always going to be emotions. A lot of them are going to be painful.

There's always going to be sensations. Some might be pleasurable, many might be painful. And that's true with the external world. And so if our idea of inner peace is this subtle sense of a future moment where then I'll be able to be at ease with the way things are. We're just going to keep running.

We're just going to end up in some future moment with a mind that is still looking for a future moment, resisting what is here. And so the journey toward inner peace has to be a journey toward getting more in this moment, relaxing more into this moment, meeting the truth of whatever is arising right now and softening into it. And the more we do that, the more we develop a coziness within ourselves, the more our mind quite literally expands in presence to hold more dimensions of who we are and has the space to do so without collapsing or being overwhelmed. So, on your journey of cultivating inner peace as the nice to-do, notice if there is a striving forward in the future and just see if you can reorient yourself to the recognition that it has to happen right now. It's right here.

It's right now. And each moment we do that, we're making progress toward this thing that we're not even trying to make progress for, but in a paradoxical way, we still are. So hope this helps. Hope this gives you something to think about. Thank you for your practice and let's settle in for today's meditation.