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 Muscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about an easier way to make change.

More to come on this in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so in my book, Stop Missing Your Life, I talked about the role of curiosity in relationship to the cultivation of wisdom.

If you read the book, you would know I shared a specific equation that said Experience Times Curiosity Equals Wisdom, where in this case wisdom refers to the mind's understanding of what creates suffering or what creates freedom and happiness.

And the foundation for this is the recognition that your mind wants you to be happy.

The mind is looking for ways to help improve your life.

If it sees a better way to do something, to do something more efficiently, to create more happiness, it will do it.

And if it sees that it's usual way of doing things is actually creating more suffering, it will stop doing that.

Of course, there are complexities to this because you could easily push back and say, well, my mind is thinking lots of negative thoughts.

And I know that that is making me suffer and yet I still continue to do it.

Well, this is an example where on one level, you know cognitively.

It's like, yeah, all these negative thoughts are causing me more stress and more tension.

But on another level, like a deeper level, the mind still believes that you need to be thinking about those negative thoughts in order to protect you.

You need those negative thoughts so that you're preparing for the future.

You need to hold on to your anxiety because it's the thing that is keeping you safe and vigilant and all of these things.

And usually that's more of a subconscious assessment.

And it is one of the reasons why a deep meditation practice, when we really start to see, like, oh, okay, yeah.

These thoughts are here, but in a moment of letting go of those negative thoughts or not fueling them, I still see very clearly that, oh, I'm safe right now.

I'm okay.

This subconscious sense that if I'm not thinking these things, I'm going to be in some form of harm.

Well, that's actually not true.

...