Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscarra, and in today's episode we're going to talk about

inhabiting the mind like a blue sky.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so I'd like to read a passage for you from the book.

How can I help by Ram Das and Paul Gorman?

So you're welcome to settle in and just receive the words almost like a meditation.

If we imagine that our mind is like the blue sky and that across it past thoughts as clouds,

we can get a feel for that part of it, which is other than our thoughts.

The sky is always present.

It contains the clouds and yet is not contained by them, so with our awareness.

It is present and encompasses all our thoughts, feelings and sensations, yet it is not the same as them.

To recognize and acknowledge this awareness with its spacious, peaceful quality is to find a very useful resource within.

We see that we need not identify with each thought just because it happens to occur.

We can remain quiet and choose which thought we wish to attend to.

And we can remain aware behind all these thoughts in a state that offers an entirely new level of openness and insight.

So there's something about this that is very fundamental, basic and follows a similar theme of so many of the things we talk about here in the practicing human podcast.

It's connecting us to awareness itself, the vastness of awareness.

But it's this ever important reminder that we need to continue to reconnect with because it's just so easy to be caught in our thoughts and overly identified in our thoughts.

Or just absorbed in whatever experience is arising, emotions, sensation, thinking mind.

And I think there's just a way that this is phrased that at least for me just expands something.

...