Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session we're going to talk about freedom. Now, when we think of freedom, we tend to think of external freedom, and this is the ability to make choices. To choose what we do, to maybe choose a job, create a life that we love, have some autonomy in the world, set up boundaries. And those are all very important forms of freedom.

They help us craft a particular life, protect ourselves and exercise some form of agency in the world. And the fullest expression of that we can really craft a life for. We can do whatever we want and have whatever we want. Maybe not all of us, but sometimes, you know, we might get to experience glimpses of that, but here's the thing with that sort of freedom. You can have the freedom to travel the world, see everything, do whatever you want, and yet still be imprisoned in your mind.

And so it's that recognition that often brings us to these practices of meditation, of mindfulness, or we could just say an inner exploration of what is it actually mean to be free internally. Because maybe I have a certain degree of freedom outside of me, and yet something in me still feels bound. And this is work that we all have to do as humans, because we have to deal with our thoughts. We have to deal with our emotions. We have to deal with our bodies that, uh, can feel pain, discomfort that will get old, that gets sick and that eventually die.

And so these are realities of being human that we can come to terms with and can find some freedom within. And so one very simple practice I like to do with this is, is to just notice when I'm feeling constricted, uh, internally, when I feel a lot of thoughts moving through my mind and the frustration around that. When I feel trapped in cognitive loops. When I feel pain in my body and frustrated with my body. And when I feel a difficult emotion that I can't make sense of.

I don't know why it's here on what it's trying to tell me. In those moments when I feel a lot of constriction, one of the first things I do is just try to relax into it. Very simple way to do that, just take a deep breath. I invite my jaw to soften, my shoulders, my belly, and any other area that's holding tension. That relaxing of the body helps the mind relax.

And it's these micro moments of inviting my whole being to just soften into what is here right now that reconditions that relationship to my internal world. I feel that tension. I go, there it is again. Soften. And so I invite you to explore that as a practice for yourself.

Again, it's, it's very simple. It's just a matter of noticing that constriction, where you're feeling tense, where you're feeling quote unquote imprisoned in your own mind, and then invite it to soften within you. That softening itself is a form of expanding around what is here, creating more space for your internal experience and finding some freedom within it and around it. So try it out. Thank you for your practice and let's get settled for our meditation.