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 and mascara, and in today's episode we're going to talk about moments of completeness.

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

Okay, so on some level we're all looking for these moments of feeling complete.

We've talked about this on the podcast in different ways, moving toward a sense of integration, a sense of wholeness,

a sense of resolution after a period of drama. In fact, a lot of times we create our own drama and problems and issues

just so that we can continue to have this process of solving them, moving toward resolution, pursuing this completeness.

Feeling like something is done, something deep in us can rest. And from a contemplative perspective, you know, different meditation traditions, Buddhist tradition,

you could even perceive this sense of completeness as Nirvana, the conditioning that is just running a cycle of do this, figure it out, grasp, release,

grasp again, release, attachment, release, just a cycle over and over and over, tension and release.

Want this, don't want this, push, pull, push, pull. It's the entire source of agitation and what we would refer to as suffering.

And the sense of completeness no longer needing to engage in that cycle, to reinforce that cycle

with some sense of there being a refuge in the next fixing, that we could perceive as a form of liberation, Nirvana.

And this is something that we can start to touch into in a meditation practice where we just drop into a stillness with the flow of our conditioning,

and conditioning referring to the momentum of the thought, emotion, sensation, sensory experience, all sort of coming together, creating something that feels pleasant, something that feels unpleasant, something that feels neutral,

thought arises, it conditions an emotion, which conditions a volition, a feeling like I have to do something, and it's just never ending.

And so in meditation you just get to sit and watch all of that play out, and the system has the opportunity to rest as all of that is just unwinding, so to speak.

And every once in a while you get to taste these moments of the system really letting go, there's no longer a feeling of being wrapped around all of that conditioning.

It's either the conditioning has quieted deeply, it's just sort of exhausted itself.

Or we've just gotten to this place where we're able to watch it from deep groundedness and ease, and where no longer entrenched in it, and there's that form of freedom.

But we can also drop into these moments of completeness throughout our day, even those moments where we are on this cycle of conditioning, of, oh, there's a problem, need to fix that problem, once I fix that problem then there'll be ease.

And then we do that, now notice what happens in those moments of, oh, there's ease, something in me has resolved.

...