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

Namaste and welcome.

So this coming Friday, my husband Jonathan and I are heading north into deep winter and

we're going to be going up to a forest refuge in New England that supposedly there's

two to three feet of snow and you know that the high might be in the 20s and so on.

So we're spending these 10 days in silence and stillness and I was reflecting on how through

the ages people on a spiritual path have done that have have left kind of the habit or routine

of day-to-day life and and taken time here and there and usually usually off in the wilderness

somewhere and out in the desert and in the forest or in a cave somewhere. Usually you don't hear

about Caribbean beaches but I'm sure that could work too. But what really occurs to me is that

we go into nature and we can do it on a daily basis and find that there's a way in which

when we're in nature the elements help to strip down our beings so we just come a part of and more

more connected to the basics. It's a way of cleansing and when we go into the wilderness

what we're really doing on retreat is going into the wilderness of our own being.

And there's an understanding through the ages that the wilderness of these bodies, these living

dying bodies is this domain that we pull away from and that it's not until we know how to really

enter and occupy and really be at home in these living bodies that these bodies actually become

a portal to to spirit to the formless. So this is the theme for tonight. One of my favorite

quotes is John O'Donohue and he describes how our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit.

It's our minds that make us so homeless. Some of that return to that some. Our bodies know they belong.

These bodies are living in the present moment. They're here. They're awake. But our minds keep us in a kind of

virtual reality that keep us separated from ourselves and from each other and from this living world.

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