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

I'm your host, Corey Miscarra, and in today's episode we're going to talk about one of the powers of meditation,

especially as it relates to creating long-term changes in you.

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

Okay, so sometimes people will ask me about the value of meditation and say certain things like,

well, I have experiences of peace, I have experiences of reduced stress, I've had experiences of feeling like one with everything.

That's on the more extreme end of things, but maybe people who have done plant medicines like adelix or even just in waking life,

it's not uncommon to have what can be called spiritual experiences where you feel a sense of oneness and openness.

Or even just spontaneous feelings of awe, like if you've visited the Grand Canyon or have been out in nature,

it's not uncommon to have these spontaneous experiences of openness, compassion, love, freedom, and selflessness.

So people will sometimes say, I've touched into that, why do I need meditation?

It's clearly possible that I can access this in other ways.

And that's true, and it will often be the first person to say that it's not like meditation is giving us access to certain states that we can't get elsewhere.

Many of them were already familiar with or have touched very deeply or profoundly in other ways.

The thing that is unique about meditation, I think, is a really good plug for the practice, is that it conditions those experiences into your being,

so they become the expression of who you are in the world on a more regular basis.

They make the opportunity for awe more available.

They make compassion your more default way of relating in the world.

They make that feeling of love that you might experience in the beginning of romantic relationship,

or maybe I'm referring more to that sense of openness, of lust, but even just love from a deep companionship,

or love for an animal, love for a tree, that can become more available to us on an ongoing basis.

It's like a state that we can nurture, that feeling of an inner freedom or selflessness.

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