Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus.

I'm your host Thomas McConkey.

Thanks for listening today.

I'm just remembering last week's episode where I shared a

personal story about my grandfather that was really impactful to me. That is not prerequisite

listening to the long form meditation we're doing today, but you might like to catch it. As I shared that story

last week, I was just aware of a koan in the Zen tradition that many of you might have heard,

and it's a koan that will inspire and support our practice today. What is the koan? What is a koan? Maybe I'll start there.

Coan is a device used in Zen Buddhism to throw a question at a student that cannot be answered

with the ordinary mind. We have to fall into something

deeper. We have to break ourselves against the rock of the koan in order to allow wisdom mind to

arrive. That's my story and I'm sticking with it. That's what I'll say a co-on is today.

But the co-on I want to just work with and sit with is show me your original face before your

parents were born. Let's do it. Take a moment to stretch up and settle in.

Wherever you are, whatever you're doing or not doing, just take a moment to land. And notice in this moment that you are experiencing experience,

you're experiencing life.

Maybe you're aware of sights, sounds, sensations in the body, commotion in the world.

It doesn't matter if you're at a park walking around, just taking in the noise and the

activity of life, or if you're shut away somewhere private with your eyes closed

in meditation, whatever the case may be, you're experiencing experience right now.

And what is it that experiences experience, but awareness?

Without awareness, there'd be no experience to experience

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