For each day, person, or even an activity as automatic as breathing, our choice of where to shine our awareness comes down to two very different concepts.

The common choice, one made by ignorance and lack of self-examination, is to focus our awareness on our memory -- and the mutant children of memory, our expectations for the present moment and the future.

This will lead to a template of what life should be like in this moment and how it ought to unfold into the future. Then, our experience of ourselves and the world will be fixed into one shape, and any variation from that shape generates an opinion about it. Life is lived in the head.

Or -- second choice here -- the awareness can concentrate its gaze onto the space between thoughts, the space between concepts, the space between the objects and the people in the world. With this choice comes many known and unknown liberations. The world is playful, you are playful, and have no time for the mind's storytelling. Spontaneity, born of clear seeing and understanding, moves you throughout the day, even as you begin to lose self-consciousness and the sensation of "I".

So, this session is about: simply watching what arises when you try to let go of your expectations surrounding anything and everything, including meditation in general and this one particularly.

Episode artwork, "Mnemosyne," a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1881, residing at the Delaware Art Museum.

NOTE: Safety statement: If at anytime while in meditation, you feel unsafe with what is arising, please pause the meditation session and seek immediate support and grounding. Contemplative practices can disturb stored traumas and may require more direct, hands-on care than I can provide through recorded guidance.