We would like the society we live in, and ourselves, to live up to these high-minded ideals; and yet emotionally we can feel just the opposite. We can feel mean, selfish, critical of ourselves and of others, deceiving ourselves and getting caught in very gross forms of desire so that we have conflict going on in our minds. I used to find it very difficult before I understood what was going on because I had high aspirations and high standards and ideals for my life and yet always seemed to be pulled down by my emotions. I’d get caught in very immature or selfish reactions and emotional habits and yet ideally I didn't want that. I wanted to be kind, generous, good and all the rest of it -- so then I’d end up with all this judging going on, judging the emotions are "bad" or thinking that there's something wrong with me for feeling like this. So there’d be a critic saying, "This is bad. You're a bad person for thinking like this, feeling like this." And so the conflict goes on. You try to justify it, you rationalise... you may manage to deceive yourself a good part of the time, but still this confusion arises, an endless emotional confusion in which one just feels a sense of despair. There’s the sense of hopelessness that comes through trying to solve one's emotional problems through the intellect or trying to suppress the emotions, or refusing to acknowledge them.
	Monastic life can be just based on an ideal of the good monk or nun and trying to live up to the standards that we read about in the scriptures. We long to be a really good monk; so then we're shocked and disgusted by our own emotional reactions, or desires, low, selfish, animalistic desires that we identify with and try to get rid of and deny. So the Buddha used mindfulness as the means to solve this dilemma. Mindfulness (sati) is a key word in Buddhist teaching: it means that when we practise meditation we use the intuitive ability of the mind. We're not rationalising or analysing anything -- even though we can do these things when necessary -- because meditation isn't an analysis or a critique or a suppression or a denial of anything but a willingness to embrace the moment. This intuition is the ability that we have, when we're receptive and fully awake and aware.