Discovering a Deeper Sense of Self

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to talk about the possibility of discovering a deeper sense of self. So although we might have a very solid idea of what kind of person we are, when we train in awareness and begin to look a little bit closer at who we are that solid fixed sense of identity starts to change a little. We begin to observe the transient and fleeting nature of body and mind, and we kind of have this realization that on one level we're more like a living process than a fixed and solid identity. So as we observe the mind for instance, and we see that thoughts are arising seemingly out of nothing and then dissolving very quickly back into nothing, even though we may have the kind of sense of having very fixed ideas and opinions, when you look closely like this at the nature of thoughts, they're anything but solid.

They're very fleeting and they actually have to be repeated over and over again to appear solid at all. And so we can't be our thoughts because we're watching our thoughts come and go. Our emotions too, come and go and continuously change. We might be prone to certain emotions or think out of ourselves maybe as an angry person or a sad person or an anxious person. But no emotion is there all the time.

So we can't be that emotion. It's not our true identity because we're observing the emotions coming and going. And the body too is changing continuously. We see that when we look in the mirror, right, or when we look back at old photos of ourselves. And actually from a scientific perspective, the cells in the body are constantly changing, dying and being regenerated.

And actually you have a whole new set of cells, a whole new body, every seven to ten years. You know, and our roles out life circumstances, our environment, our community, our world, all of it is a flow of ongoing change. So as we look at these changing conditions, we find that there's nothing we can point to and say, that's a solid, fixed identity. So it'll be closer to say that you're a living process. You are, uh, a flow of life.

We, human beings love to define things and put mental labels on things. But if we can lay aside that tendency to see ourselves solely through mental definitions, we can find out who we are in our direct experience, who we are beyond all definitions. And with that discovery comes a lot of freedom and peace of mind. So we'll explore this a little more in today's meditation, and I invite you to settle in for that now. And as always, thank you very much for your practice and for your presence here in this community.