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How to Meditate: Meditation 101 for Beginners
10 Science-Backed Benefits of Meditation
What is Meditation?
How to Meditate: Meditation 101 for Beginners
10 Science-Backed Benefits of Meditation
What is Meditation?
Benefits of Mindfulness: Mindful Living Can Change Your Life
Mindfulness 101: A Beginner's Guide
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Personalized support for learning how to integrate mindfulness into your life. Delivered fresh everyday by our world renowned experts. Choose meditation duration:
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.
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