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 are going to talk about

freeing yourself from your mind.

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

So many people are often curious to hear what the biggest insight is that I've gotten from my meditation practice.

They specifically want to hear what the biggest insight is when you spend many months in silent practice meditating hours per day.

And there's lots that came up there for sure, but one of the biggest insights still to this day that has come from my meditation practice came from maybe the first couple hours of me ever meditating while I was in college lying on my dorm room bed just trying to focus on my breath.

And then I'm watching thoughts come and go and then bringing my attention back to the breath.

That very simple practice was the first time that I saw that I could watch my thoughts rather than being caught up in my thoughts or having to react to my thoughts or taking my thoughts as truth or me.

Prior to that, it's hard to even know how I was orienting to my thoughts, but I know I didn't have freedom there.

I know I was swept around by them, caught up in whatever they would tell me.

I felt bad when they were judgmental, felt good when they were positive.

Mostly I'd say I was oblivious to it all and it was just operating in the background.

And so here I was for the first time seeing that there was a way to become or better to say anchor into the observer of these experiences rather than caught in the experiences themselves, these experiences being thoughts.

That simple recognition really opened the door of a deeper inquiry into who am I?

Who am I if I'm not my thoughts? And what is the potential to find even more freedom from myself?

More freedom from the aspects of my experience that I have felt bound by, tormented by or that I've just taken as a fact of my life and hope that it gets better or try to make the arrangement of internal experiences better so that I feel better about it.

And here there was a totally new way of relating to my experience that fundamentally changed the experience just by being an observer to the thoughts.

Now granted I don't want to oversell that.

Although there's an argument to him that it could be oversold and it wouldn't be considered being oversold because the truth is you can reach tremendously, profoundly.

And even complete inner freedom by anchoring more and more into the observer of your experience, the observer of your thoughts rather than the thoughts of the experience themselves.

So when people say things like mindfulness is in a panacea, I'm always like, yeah, of course, in the way that you're orienting to it, of like just be present or take a mindful breath or enjoy your coffee while you're sipping on it.

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