Hello, and welcome back to Practicing Human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I am your host, Cory Muscarra, tuning in from Cropalu Retreat Center in Massachusetts.

In today's session, I'm going to talk about the value of tuning into neutral moments.

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

I'll ring them, you listen all the way until it dissolves into silence.

Okay, let's talk about neutral moments.

So one can argue that all experiences more or less fall into three categories.

Right, we have pleasant experiences, we have unpleasant experiences, and then we have the neutral experiences.

Not so much in a category of things that we're enjoying and not so much in a category of things we're not enjoying, they're just sort of there.

Now we're often, as you can imagine, most sensitive to the first two, pleasant and unpleasant.

And we're evolutionarily wired to be scanning our environment for the things we might want that could be pleasurable, and the things that we don't want that are unpleasant.

But what about these neutral moments?

Because chances are a great number of your moments fall into this category, maybe even this moment right now.

Not particularly pleasant, although I hope you're feeling pleasant.

And not particularly unpleasant, just sort of neutral.

And I think it's very easy to pass by the neutral moments of our life.

It often just indicates that things are okay, they meet the status quo.

But we can miss many moments of our life when we're not tuned into this category of experience.

But what if you made the intention to appreciate these moments?

To not just be mindful of them, to not just be aware of them, but to actually appreciate the goodness of a neutral moment?

What would that be like?

What would it be like to feel the yumminess of neutrality?

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