Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I'd like to offer you a new definition for mindfulness. Now, one of the definitions that I've often utilized that I wrote about in my book is mindfulness is this capacity to be with our experience rather than in our experience in a way that is spacious, curious and heartfelt. One thing you'll notice in that definition is that I don't say non-judgment, which is often used in mindfulness. And instead I replaced that with curiosity, bringing a curious orientation to our experience.

And the reason I've done that is because I feel like curiosity accomplishes what non-judgment aims to accomplish. Curiosity is inherently non-judgemental. It just aims to understand what is here right now, not necessarily put it in a category of good or bad. It's just wondering, oh, what is this moment like? What is this experience like? So I, I stand by curiosity. However, the one thing that can sometimes happen with curiosity, is it can create a very active orientation to our experience.

This sort of depends on how we relate to curiosity. But I know for a lot of people, when they think of curiosity, there's this feeling of like, I need to figure this out, what is this about? And that in meditation can actually reinforce the sense of an individual I, or a sense of self that needs to come to some sort of conclusion or a, win something in the meditation, or really dig in and get to know something. And that can potentially be problematic because one of the things we're also wanting to cultivate in meditation is this receptive quality, receiving what is arising into awareness. So I want to offer a very simple, new two word definition of mindfulness, receptive curiosity. Receptive curiosity.

We're leaning back, we're receiving the moment as it comes to us into awareness. But we also have this curious orientation of what is this moment like, what's here now. If there's some pain or a thought and we're paying attention to it, the curiosity might say, Hmm, what is this experience like? What is it like to have a thought? What is it like to feel this pain in this moment? But it's done in a way that's not trying to dig into the experience or win or get to the conclusion of something. It's just this soft, passive receiving of the moment with a gentle interest in what's happening. So see if this works for you.

What I like about receptive curiosity. Is that it can be integrated into your meditation practice, but it can also be integrated as almost a mantra throughout your day. Anytime you find yourself tense, overwhelmed, or just wanting to drop into a more present state, you can just drop that phrase in, receptive curiosity, and see what it shifts in your internal experience for you. Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.