Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to speak to the unanswered questions that are often in our hearts. So you're often when we start out on the path of mindfulness, we have many questions in our hearts that we're seeking the answers to, problems that we want to know how to solve. But as we train in awareness, the seeking and the straining for the answers often begins to soften. And the questions themselves often dissolve in time, leaving us to abide in the present moment full of calm, vitality and contentment.

So the human mind. It's a problem solving machine. That's how it evolved. It evolved like this to function in this way that it solves problems to kind of keep us alive. So solving problems, asking questions, figuring things out, understanding concepts.

That's what the mind is really good at. It's always asking questions and looking for solutions. So while this problem solving capacity is wonderful when it comes to keeping us fed, safe and comfortable in the external world, when we get permanently stuck in this kind of mindset, we start to experience life itself as if it was a problem to be solved instead of an experience to be lived. Like it's a question that we want an answer to. But mindfulness offers the possibility of knowing life in a way that's much more profound than mental concept.

It allows us to let go of the seeking mind, all of its questions and concepts and dwell in the direct experience of what it is to be alive. As Joseph Campbell once said, "I don't believe that people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they're looking for the experience of being fully alive." And that's what mindfulness gives us, the experience of being truly alive. And then perhaps paradoxically, we then find a deep sense of connectedness with life, a deep sense of its meaning, but not as a concept, but as an experience to be lived. And the more we do that, the more that we often find the questions we had in our minds no longer really matter. Typically that's because we realize that the questions were just the mind seeking and problem solving as it's programmed to do.

And we just let that go and learn to be at peace in the present moment. So no matter how burning a question you may have in your heart, just seeing if it's possible to soften the seeking a little bit today, or just hold those questions a little more lightly. And trust that by continuing to practice mindfulness, you'll cultivate more and more insight and understanding in your mind and a greater peace and contentment in your heart. So as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And now let's settle in for today's meditation.