Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session we're going to talk about spiritual maturity. Now the word spirituality lands differently for different people. Now personally, I was someone that was, uh, very opposed to that word for a long time. And it was mainly because I just didn't understand what it meant.

The way I use spirituality is just to refer to how we understand ourselves beyond just the thoughts moving through our mind, our emotions, or even our external accomplishments. And many could argue that you are on a spiritual journey, uh, just exploring this app and these meditations and exploring who you are beyond just the thoughts passing through your mind. And so what is spiritual maturity? Well, there's a lot of different ways to think about that. But one of the ways I think we can look at maturation in this journey is just the recognition that there's no internal or external experience that can lead to lasting peace. There's no internal or external experience that can lead to lasting peace.

This is one of the first insights that really pulls us to go deeper into meditation and into just the exploration of what it means to be human. Sometimes this happens because we started meditating and we saw that, wow, everything is constantly changing or in flux. And it, it triggers us to recognize that, you know, where can I take refuge in anything? And the meditation traditions, they often say that the first stage of wisdom, a person is considered wise when they've truly seen the impermanent nature of experience. And because it's only then that, that person is a bit disillusioned by the idea of accumulating a lot of things, whether it's external material things, or even a momentary feeling or emotion or sensation. The more, we pay attention to that flow of external experience as it changes around us, the relationships, people, material, things, and our internal landscape, thoughts, emotions, sensations, the more we see it's just, it's constantly changing.

There's no refuge to be taken in, in any given moment in such that it's going to last forever, that this hmm, particular arrangement of experiences is now going to be where we find peace forever. Instead that sparks an interest and an understanding that perhaps a deeper peace, a deeper joy, a deeper happiness can only be found by learning to move fluidly with the changing landscape of our life. The good news is that's what you're exploring each time you meditate. So hopefully this inspires you a little bit more to, uh, continue your practice and to maybe even think about maturity in a, in a different kind of way/ as always thank you for your practice. And I'll talk to you in the meditation.