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

Welcome to this gathering and class. This is our second in a series on happiness.

And the reality is we each of us have a really deep capacity to feel a sense of at peace

at home with what's happening and a sense of joy and celebration about life.

And as we know, day by day, we have this habit to resist and to contract and to chase after

things and not really to let ourselves rest in and enjoy. We don't have many moments where

there's that sense of enough. I could die right now. This moment just as it is is enough.

So one of the more existential descriptions of how things are is that we incarnate and feel a sense of separation.

And right out of that separation, there's a sense that something's missing. There's not enough incomplete.

And then we become fully organized around trying to get more complete and large. Connect. Fill what's missing.

So the last, in the first class that we did on this, the exploration really was what is between me and happiness.

And what we come up with, if we're really honest in any moment, is there is that sense that right now something's missing or something's wrong.

And if we think of it in an evolutionary way, there's this negativity bias that's part of our survival brain that has us fixate on what's wrong.

And leaves us with either defensiveness or aggression or kind of cynicism.

Remember hearing a story about, I think it was a professor at Columbia that was lecturing his class one day.

And he said in English, two negatives make a positive.

But in some languages, for instance, Russian, two negatives still remain a negative.

But there's no language where in two positives make a negative.

And then somebody in the back of the class said, yeah, right.

Thought that was cute.

So there's two basic modes of practice that evolve us really.

And they give us access to our potential for joy.

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