Hello and welcome back to the practicing human podcast this is the

podcast where every day we are practicing getting a little better at life. I'm your

host Cori Muscarra and for those who have been listening you

will be happy to hear quite literally the sound has improved. Yes, my new microphone has arrived. I apologize for some of the poor

audio over the last few days. I am a stickler for good audio. So I'm hoping you're enjoying it as much as I am. In today's

episode we're going to talk about why the more at ease you become with yourself

the less you need to manufacture the world around you.

More to come in a moment, but first let's settle in with the lovely bells.

I'll ring them, you listen, and follow the sound

all the way until it dissolves into silence.

silence. Hmm. Hmm, that was a good one. Okay, so today's episode, the more at ease you become with yourself the less you need to manufacture the world around you.

Hmm. I think that's something we know intuitively. We hear this message in different ways as we're growing up, the idea that

nothing external can give us lasting happiness or you have to love yourself first before anyone else can, all of this stuff.

But if you look at how most of us are navigating life, it does appear at least to me that we're still trying to navigate the external world to

To fit our blueprint of how it should be so that we can feel more at ease. And we get hits of that being true because there is some relief,

a little bit of a dopamine hit

or something settling in our nervous system when the external world does conform to what we want it to be.

Usually that's just out of luck or we work really hard for something

and then we get it and then there's like oh yes finally got it but we also know that that's a never-ending treadmill and then it's the next thing that we're chasing and then we get that and

then we get that sense of ease. So there's this constant striving for that moment of

release where the tension goes away, we can feel at ease, but it's contingent upon the external conditions

of our world offering that ease.

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