The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist and author.

There's a poet, an Indian poet from the 1600s, name is Tukaram.

I would like to read you a brief poem translated by Daniel Ladinsky that he wrote.

I was meditating with my cat the other day and all of a sudden she shouted, what happened?

I knew exactly what she meant but encouraged her to say more, feeling that if she got it all out on the table she would sleep better that night.

So I responded, tell me more dear and she's soulfully meowed.

Well, I was mingled with the sky, I was comets whizzing here and there, I was suns and he held I was galaxies but now look, I am landlocked and fur.

To this I said, I know exactly what you mean.

What does say about conversation between mystics?

Tell me more and she's soulfully meowed.

It's great.

So I love it because it has such a poignant way of expressing this way that we all remember and forget that there's something we might feel a sense of expansiveness and openness and in a moment.

We can get triggered to go, you know, and all of a sudden we're confined back in that familiar self again.

And after I read that I was reminded of one of my earliest kind of transpersonal experiences.

I don't even know how old I was, you know, eight, nine, ten, where I started imagining and sensing that I was living inside this bubble and there was all these thoughts and things happening at some point.

And things happening inside me yet in some way there was something out there, some consciousness, something bigger that I couldn't get out of my bubble.

And that stayed with me for a number of years.

And it's very much what I find a kind of archetypal experience that many of us have where we're trying to get out of an enclosed space, a trap.

It's in dreams, it's in myths.

It's one of those pervasive senses of being kind of in some way cut off from something and trying to find our way back.

And in a way it's really the major theme of all spiritual life that there is something more we intuit and we're in a process of waking up to it.

And we can sense when we're not living inside the fullness and the wholeness and the truth.

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