Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about freedom. So I'll start by sharing a bold statement, as I sometimes do. That is, you can be free to do whatever you want in the world, but still be imprisoned in your mind. Let that one land for a moment.

You can be free to do whatever you want in the world, but still be imprisoned in your mind. I'm personally a big proponent of arranging your lifestyle and external world in such a way that allows you to explore the things that feel meaningful and interesting to you. I'm also an advocate for systemic changes that create more external safety and access to resources for people. So the arrangement of the world around us, I think is really important. And the freedom that can come with that is important.

And there are certain forms of freedom and safety we can only access by freeing ourselves from ourselves, or we could say freeing ourselves within ourselves. If we feel overly identified with and burdened by our thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, et cetera, we will be trapped in suffering no matter how much freedom we have externally. And so this is one of those subtle truths that we might recognize and yet, if we look at how we go about our life, there really is this feeling of once I get there, or once all of this comes into place, or once I have this freedom, then I'll really be able to live my life, then there'll be a totally new opening for me. And yes, in some circumstances, that can be true to an extent. But we still have to be in our own mind, we still have to be in our own body.

And the journey defining freedom here is not only a big one, but it's the ultimate one. It's the one that we can take into all different circumstances. So one that allows us to feel grounded and more at ease and in a way that's less contingent upon what's going on around us. And, you know, as somebody that has made some progress on that journey and someone that was really addicted to the external world being a certain way, um, I could just say from personal experience, it, it has been transformational and it's one of the things that inspires me to teach and share this work with others. So the good news is you're you're on the journey, but just continue to notice in your own life if there is a feeling of my freedom will come when this happens.

Take a moment to stop, take a breath, connect to what's here and see if you can relax a little bit more deeply into this moment as it is. There's a different kind of freedom that comes once we do. And we can explore that in more and more expansive ways. Thanks for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.