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

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

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

Namaste and welcome.

In this class and the next we are going to be exploring the basic elements in a meditation practice.

The elements that really make meditation something that can transform our hearts and our consciousness.

And it's interesting just to watch how rapidly more and more popular meditations becoming.

And it's kind of a good news bad news thing in the sense that people are so hugely stressed that there's almost this crisis in a sense of living on a treadmill, not just a normal life.

It's not really touch into the meaning and the beauty of life and a lot of depression and anxiety that brings people to meditation.

And the good news is there really is an evolving of consciousness whereby something's waking up in many many people that wants to keep on waking up and is using these practices to help them.

So of course this has all been really reinforced and supported in modern neuroscience studies, thousands and thousands of studies that describe how our immune system gets supported and how much more emotional resilience we have, and cognitive clarity and improves memory.

And all the things check it off the list that are mattering to people.

I sometimes think that my next book should be something like, lose weight, improve your sex life and be intuitive about the stock market, learn to meditate.

That would make it.

So some of you are aware that there's all different ways that the culture is being invited in.

You just practice five minutes a day for three weeks and you'll get X, Y and Z. And it's very American, you know, how it's being done.

There's one psychotherapist from the Bay Area who went to Las Vegas and brought back a sign he put it up in his office and it says, you must be present to win.

So in a deep way, the training of our hearts and minds validates what mystics from all face, from all continents have been saying over the eons,

which is when we slow down and we start listening to the life that's right here, we get access to a very deep and natural intelligence and a quality of open-heartedness that leads to being happy and really leads to inner freedom.

And I think in a deep way that's really what draws us.

So the challenge, as we know, that both makes us need meditation and makes it really hard to meditate is that we're quite hooked on speeding away from the present moment.

So I think of our culture. It is so fast-paced and busy that it's very rare to arrive and just luxuriate in what's right here.

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