Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness.

Today I'm going to talk

about the possibility of

living life without a story.

So what do I mean by life without a story?

Well, have you ever seen a

director's commentary of a film?

So, this is where the director of

a film will comment on what was

happening in the making of the movie.

So how it works is the original film

is playing, but with muted volume,

and then you hear the director's

voiceover providing their own personal

take on what was happening at that

point in the making of the movie.

So the whole way through the movie,

they're speaking over the top and

adding their viewpoints, their thoughts,

their stories, and their opinions.

Now most people hardly ever watch

these to the end because they get a bit

boring, but this is a good analogy of

what it's like living with a human mind.

You know, we constantly

have two things happening.

We have our direct experience or what we

sometimes call our primary experience.

And this is the direct experience,

the actual experience of our

lives - the colors, the shapes, the

experiences, our sense perceptions.

Then we also have have in any given

moment, our secondary experience.

This is all the thoughts we

have about primary experience.

So we have our viewpoints, our

opinions, our judgments, our

beliefs, all this mental commentary

that we have going on in the mind.

Anyone with a normal human mind

has this going on, we all do it.

But the problem is, that for many of

us, our mental commentary can become

so ongoing, so loud and so relentless

that our actual experience of life

itself can start to feel like it's been

muted and dulled by the mind's noise.

Life can start to lose its vividness,

vibrancy, mystery, and joy.

It's a bit like that director's

commentary, you know, the voice

in our heads could really take the

fun out of our actual experience

that we're trying to have.

It can make it really

hard to fully connect.

So mindfulness offers us a way

to reconnect with the full color,

richness, the beauty of our lives again.

It allows us, you could say, to kind of

turn the volume dial down on the mind

as we reclaim more of our attention that

was caught up in secondary experience,

the thoughts in the mind, and we place

it back in our primary experience, our

direct experience of what's happening

moment to moment in our lives.

So today, whenever you find yourself

caught up in the director's commentary

of your life, that secondary experience,

see if you can just notice that and

then wherever possible, just practice

bringing your focus back to your primary

experience, your sense perceptions - what

you can feel, see, hear, smell, and taste.

In this way, we get to take a break from

that constant scene by scene voiceover.

Good, bad, right, wrong, judgments,

opinions, and storymaking of all kinds.

And we open two rich

new vistas of our lives.

And as we open our minds and hearts to

the beauty, the wonder and the simplicity

of the world around us, we simultaneously

reconnect with presence and inner peace.

So as always, thank you for your

practice and your presence here with us.

Now let's settle in

for today's meditation.