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

Welcome and Namaste. There's a pretty well-known story of the magician Harry Houdini.

He'd be traveling around Europe and he would challenge the local jailers to put him in a straight jacket and put him in a cell and then he'd break loose without any trouble.

He had never encountered a new-fangled lock. The jailer admitted to him that he had never locked the lock.

He just left it there on lock and Houdini was locking himself in.

I love this because it's a really very clear illustration of how egoic conditioning is to assume there's a problem and to keep on tinkering away at things, trying to figure things out, trying to do something about what's wrong, trying to defend ourselves, trying to address.

It's all in this underlying assumption that we have to do something and something any moment is going to crash or go wrong in our life.

It's quite natural that it's part of our identity and part of our job, so to speak, to take care of these cells.

That's part of the deal for us. We're living in a very confined world. If we're continually under the impression that something's wrong and we have to fix it or do something about it or get out of some sort of a tough situation or solve a problem.

If that's our chronic mind state, it's a pretty compressed world. Because we can never really pause, we can never arrive, and we can never really connect with a fullness and openness of our heart, a sense of the awareness that's right here.

This is a bit of an entree into the third of a three-part series of classes that I've been offering, and if you're here for the first time, don't worry. They stand on their own, and I'd encourage you if you have time to check out the last two.

This is based on a story from the Upanishads, and it's really the general theme is how in the face of this changing, living, dying world, can we pause and open up to that timeless being or presence that really is what's rich and alive about our existence? How do we do that?

In this story, as a young man in India, who got into a conflict with his father, he publicly embarrassed his father and his father basically told him to go to hell, which is in the language was really go to Lord Yamaha, I give you to Lord Yamaha, the Lord of Death.

So Nachiketa went and pursued the Lord of Death, or defined him, and wanted to meet with him, and he was so persistent, and he put up with so much that when he finally did meet with the Lord of Death, he was granted three boons.

Lord Yamaha said, any three wishes, and so these classes have been organized around the three wishes, and his first wish, his first wish was really for forgiveness, that he could let go of any anger and hatred that he held towards his father or towards anyone, because Nachiketa was a wise young man, and he knew that to really pursue a path of awakening and being able to do what he wanted.

So in freedom, he needed an undefended heart, a heart that wasn't carrying that kind of armoring. So that was the first wish, and that was the first class that we had.

The second wish was that for inner fire. Now, inner fire is the energy or the juice that has us really commit to pursuing a path.

And in the whole hardness, it says, there's something that really matters to me. And as we know, in our day to day life, we often get distracted.

We often get way laid, and get caught chasing after things, or defending against things, worrying, planning, and we sometimes, and this is fairly frequently, lose track of what really is important to us.

Every reflection is sometimes if you were at the end of your life looking back, what would really matter? And we forget that.

So that was the second week. His third and final wish, our boon, was really for self-realization. It was really that wish. I want to know my true nature.

I want to know who I am. And as a response to that wish, Lord Yamas gave him a mirror. And he said, the path of self-realization is to look into your own awareness.

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