Welcome to episode 1,830 of the Daily Meditation Podcast.

I'm Mary Mickley and I welcome you to a brand new series we're launching into this week.

All week long, you will explore trusting yourself.

This is part of a collection of meditation series where the focus is all about confidence.

In the previous weeks, we explored feeling confident and having a positive perception of yourself.

We also explored feeling confident in the world and how to manage distress.

In this week's series, you will learn to trust yourself.

And trusting yourself can be challenging, it can be frightening, can even feel a little

dangerous, not dangerous in the way that there's any kind of physical

threat to you, but rather dangerous in how others perceive you. This can be the scariest threat

of all. But I think that as you go throughout this series, you will find that being yourself

and trusting yourself is much safer than concealing who you really are or putting on a mask.

So you will be removing that mask in this week's series as you begin a quest to trust yourself all

week long. And you have a challenge this week. Your challenge this

week is something I'd like you to do each day. I know that it's not always easy to sit down

and meditate.

So many things come up.

And there are just days when even when you do sit down to meditate,

it's just difficult to focus. And you may get up feeling as though you really didn't feel any measure of improved peace, energy, or clarity.

And that happens.

But just the fact that you showed up for yourself will allow you to trust yourself,

regardless of whether or not you meditate well.

...