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're going to talk about the subtle nuance of understanding impermanence.

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

Okay, impermanence, it's a big word in spiritual communities, contemplative practices, the meditation traditions, but also just in life in general.

Many of us have a recognition that things are impermanent. We see it clearly in our day to day, we see relationships come and go, we see the landscape outside quite literally changing.

We see our life changing, we see ourselves changing, and we also have the recognition as humans that we are born and we live a life and someday we pass.

So we have that understanding of impermanence as well.

So there's a recognition of it, and people tend to bully themselves into trying to be free by saying something like, oh I shouldn't be attached to this or everything's impermanent.

But it tends to remain just a nice idea rather than embodied understanding, maybe experiences I certainly have.

And unfortunately, the understanding of impermanence really lacks, well, everything that is pointing to when it is just a nice idea, just something that we say as like a trite quote, all things are impermanent just like go.

I mean, come on, it is, we know it's not that easy and we end up creating more tension for ourselves when we pretend like it's that easy because then we're frustrated that it's not that easy that we're still holding on and then we try to write off the whole thing, hold together.

So this is where the subtle nuance of understanding impermanence comes in.

Impermanence is not understood through thinking about impermanence. Impermanence is understood through witnessing impermanence.

It's not understood by thinking about it, it's understood by witnessing it.

And this is why a meditation practice actually develops the deep wisdom of impermanence, not the deep wisdom of like we just get really good at knowing how all things are impermanent.

It's like it doesn't even need to be said anymore. The mind has reorganized itself to just understand as a belief structure outside of cognitive thinking that things are impermanent and organically let's go.

How does this happen through a meditation practice? Well, you bring your attention more intimately into your experience.

At the heart of most meditation, we're just paying more careful attention to what is here. It might seem like a basic breath practice of focusing on the breath as a way to develop concentration and it can be used in that way.

But even just that simple practice of focusing on the breath, this not just about concentration, it's concentration and stability of mind and service of seeing more clearly your actual experience.

And when you really start paying attention on very subtle levels, you just understand, oh yeah, every breath comes and it goes, comes and it goes.

There's another one comes and it goes and another one comes and it goes.

And you have to let go of that in order to attend to the next one. Here's another one comes and it goes.

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