Your Life Beyond the Story

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, we're going to talk about seeing beyond the stories we have about our lives. So a good analogy for this is to imagine your whole life as a book. On every page of the book, there are words describing all kinds of experiences. The story could be a love story, a tragedy, a comedy, an awakening story, a sad story, or an epic, or a little bit of all of them.

But behind the stories, whatever they may be, there's the paper that allows the story to exist. So the paper doesn't usually get our attention because we're immersed in the words. It's so obvious and so essential and yet we overlook it. Awareness, your true nature is very much like that paper behind the stories of life. You are not the mental stories about your life.

Your memories, your achievements, your fears, your abilities, or lack thereof. You know, your plans, your roles, your titles, underneath all of that you are awareness itself, that spacious all embracing field in which all of those storylines are unfolding. You know, the stories keep changing. Pleasant words, unpleasant words, words about suffering, words about love, stories, about struggle, stories about peace, stories about death and new life, stories about trying to find completion, wholeness. But through all of those stories, the paper remains there ever present and holding the stories in its embrace.

So from the perspective of our mind, the story of our life seems desperately important. We spend enormous amount of mental energy trying to figure out how to get our story to work out on the external level, how we're going to fix ourselves, how we're going to change ourselves, we're going to solve our problems, get our life all neat and tidy and together. Really, we try so hard to complete ourselves. We all want to get the story to work out, you know, because we're thinking when we finally get this story to work out, we're going to feel whole. But from the perspective of awareness, the story doesn't matter too much and nothing really needs resolving or completing on that level.

The story is accepted just as it is, and it's allowed to be told and unfold. Resting as awareness where already complete and whole. So through mindfulness, we're not learning to just sort of fix our stories up or complete them, but rather we're learning to let go of those storylines, whatever they are and touchdown on the place inside us that's already at peace. As always, thank you for your practice and your presence here. Let's settle in for today's meditation.