Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness.. In today's session, I'm going to share with you a phrase to free your mind. Now in meditation, one of the things we're doing is taking a stance to our experience as an impartial witness. This happens organically as we connect to awareness itself. Awareness is that part of us that's able to observe what is happening without being caught in what is happening.

Your awareness of fear is not fearful. Your awareness of pain is not in pain. Your awareness of your boredom is not bored. And so there's this aspect of us that we're connecting to in meditation that's very spacious, that can hold the full spectrum of our, of our human experience. However, even though we're working to get connected to that, we can still get snagged.

And when that happens, I have a phrase that you can use in those moments to help you meet that experience with a little bit more ease and grace. And the phrase is, Oh, that's interesting. Oh, that's interesting. Now this is something that I did when I was practicing intensively in Burma, and there would be mosquitoes flying around and I'd be sweating. There would be pain in my back.

Difficult thoughts, difficult emotions. And as a way to work with those experiences, more fluidly, I just started dropping this phrase into my experience. Oh, that's interesting. A thought would arise that says, Cory, you got to get out of here. This is too intense.

Oh, that's interesting. Pain in my knee would come up. Oh, that's interesting. A feeling of boredom would arise. Oh, that's interesting.

And while it might seem that this would lead to apathy or a sense of numbness, that's not the experience. It tends to, instead, allow us to move fluidly with what's arising rather than getting caught in the emotional charge of what's here. Awareness kind of takes this attitude in our relationship to our experience. It's not judging it. It's not putting it in a category of, of good or bad.

That happens in the mind and it can be useful. But awareness is just going, Oh, this is what's here now. And I interpreted that as, Oh, this is interesting. Oh, that's interesting. So it's something that you can bring into your meditation practice and see if it works for you.

It may or may not. But when you find yourself caught up in a thought, caught up in an emotion, or maybe throughout the entire practice, anything that you, that arises, you could just say, Oh, that's interesting. And notice how it shifts your stance in relationship to that experience so that you're less caught in the emotional charge of the experience. Something to try out. Thanks for your practice.

Let's settle in for today's meditation.