Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus.

I'm your host Thomas Mconki.

Thanks so much for listening today.

Okay, people, we're on day 10 million of quarantine.

I hope your pantry is stocked and you're getting used to these new rhythms of life.

Certainly gives us ample opportunity to pay close attention to our experience moment to moment and to relate to experience in an optimal way.

This is what I want to talk about today, and this is really a foundation of mindfulness practice,

contemplative practice, whatever tradition we're practicing

in, what you find, what I've found is at the heart of these meditative, contemplative

traditions, is a realization that whatever happens to us, whatever the content of our experience may be,

our response and relationship to experience is what's paramount.

We can't control the content of experience, usually, to much of any extent. We can't even really control

in a significant way the next thought we're going to have. The brain will just think something,

and then we'll be aware of the thought, and then we'll have an opportunity to have a certain relationship

with that thought. But it's to say that experience is flowing is happening all the time and therefore

we have an opportunity every single moment to be in right relationship with our experience.

I've got a little bit of an analogy that I hope helps us enter more deeply into the practice today. We go back to the late 17th century.

The first scientist to construct a microscope powerful enough to observe living cells at the microscopic level was a man by the name of Anton von Levanhook.

This happened in the year, 1670, if I remember correctly, if my show notes are correct that I'm reading from right now.

He was the first scientist to be able to observe living biological life at a microscopic level.

And among other things that he described, he was the first to talk about bacteria.

And after he discovered, named, recognized bacteria, it was a matter of time before other scientists elaborated on that insight based on Levan Hook's detailed observation.

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