ROHAN GUNATILLAKE: Thank you for joining us for today’s original meditation. If you’re looking for one of our classic stories, we invite you to visit the rest of our library.

It’s a beautiful house. It looks like the kind of place you might see in magazines or on fancy Instagram accounts. Modern Scandi, maybe Japanese vibes, with Victorian-era cobblestones outside the front door. Inviting and interesting artwork, clean lines, surprising spaces.

It’s also our house. And it’s never looked better. Which is intentional I guess, since after eleven years here, we’re selling it. It’s taken weeks of clearing out and touching up, and now that my wife Lucy and the kids have gone down to her parents for the next week, I’m all set to host the viewings.

I end up doing 35 — fitting them all around my existing work. To be honest, it’s exhausting. But it’s also lovely to do, and after a few show-arounds, I’m pretty good at it. I perfect the order of things to show — hone the delivery of what seem like spontaneous lines, that actually I say once every thirty minutes during my long blocks of viewings.

But when the show’s over for the day, I’m alone in the house. It’s home, but not home. My family isn’t here. Most of our stuff isn’t here. It’s tidy and precise, rather than full of the wonderful organic mess that comes with life with a seven and four year old, and a dog. I’m even sleeping in my son’s bunk bed, so our main bedroom is kept neat.

As I walk around the space, I start a different tour. It’s the tour I didn’t give. This is the place where Lucy built a wall all by herself, and then the following New Year’s Eve we donned overalls and knocked it down with a sledgehammer, just to try something new. Here, just where you are standing at the bottom of the stairs, is where my daughter Sophia was born. The birthing pool is still in the shed outside if you’d like to see it. It was the most magical morning. Here is the bit of the garden where Nessie played as a nine week old puppy, before she was safe to go out into the park. There, is where I cried that time.

Twelve years of life, all of my family’s life is here in this house. And that is what I see when I’m here. But all that is totally invisible to the people who I show around. An invisible layer of invisible stories and meaning. That layer is where my heart is, but when I show all the prospective buyers around, it’s the rest of this space that they love.

We all attach meaning to places. It’s a human thing. So in celebration of that very human thing, let’s do a mini meditation on that theme.

With eyes open and chest and shoulders relaxed, look at the space around you. Take it in.

With eyes open and eyes relaxed, know what it’s like to just see what’s here — letting the light reflected off objects, come into the eyes. Just seeing the space around you.

Now if you haven’t already, allow in a memory of something that happened here. This is where I did that. This is where I did that thing. Or where someone I care about did this. Remember that story and see the space through the lens of that story, seeing through the lens of the meaning it has for you, giving it permission to affect you however it affects you.

Now see if you can revert back to just seeing the space without the meaning and without the stories you attach to it. Is it even possible? And if it is, can you flip between the two ways of looking? We’re interested in how we might be able to flexibly put on different lenses and what that feels like.

Part of getting ready to sell the house was putting a lot of stuff into storage. The house is lovely to look at and be in, but during the viewings, there is a lot of white space. To the people I’m showing around, it’s a potential, but for me, it’s an absence.

Possessions matter. As someone who’s done a fair bit of meditation and spent time in monastic community, on one end you have the very clean, minimalist Zen aesthetic. And on the other end, the busy, colorful, even gaudy vibes of the Tibetans. And there’s everything in between. It’s certainly true that doing a lot of practice does mean you inevitably end up exploring your relationship to possessions. I remember talking to a monk in Thailand, and him saying that even though he only had a handful of possessions, it meant, for him, that he just really clung onto his few things, like a lot. His razor blade was a precious treasure and the slightest prospect of losing it, unbearable to imagine.

It was refreshing to hear and I reflect on this a lot as I stay in the house by myself. The tub of toys that I hate having to tidy up all the time. The tub that more often than not, if the TV remote control has gone AWOL, yes it’s nestling in the middle of there, amongst all the plastic blocks and dinosaurs. But I miss that tub. The good news I realize is that I will be reunited again with that tub soon, when it’s out of storage and I can hate it all over again.

For this part of the practice, bring to mind an object that has a lot of meaning for you. Eyes open or eyes closed, it’s up to you.

The object you choose could be something near to you now or something else that most stands out to you.

Take some time to explore your relationship to this object.

What is it that makes it special?

How does reflecting on it feel in the body? How does it affect your mind?

Whether it’s the space around you or the object that you just reflected on, what most likely makes it so charged, so important to you, is a memory — perhaps a cherished memory.

So let’s take a memory from your space or from your object.

Bring it to mind.

And with it here.

Notice its insubstantiality.

Feel its edges.

Notice how it doesn’t have much “thing-ness.”

With this lack of “thing-ness,” still, it moves us.

This is its beauty.

This is the beauty of memory.

After a week of viewings, I go down to be with the family. And a few days later, on holiday in France, we accept an offer on our house. We’re excited about what new memories will be created for the incoming owners and what our new life will be. We don’t know where we’re going, but we do know that we’ll get there. It’s a lovely kind of limbo.

We’d love to hear your personal reflections from today’s meditation. You can find us on all your social media platforms through our handle @MeditativeStory, or you can email us at: [email protected].