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

I wanted to begin. I was very touched and I loved Trudy's sharing last night about

Wise Effort and it reminded me of an experience I had in 2001.

This was a few weeks before 9-11 and I was at the World Trade Center at a conference on

Buddhism. It was run by Tricycle magazine. It's one of their first Buddhist conferences.

They asked, as the opening address, they asked about six of us to speak to the question of

what if we had just in ten minutes described from a Buddhist perspective, what is the key to

liberation, to happiness, to realization, what's the key to it? They had a line up of at least

in my eyes back then of real elders and I was the only woman in the line up and the person

before me was Richard Baker-Roshi and maybe you don't know of him. Suzuki-Roshi's air, well

in my eyes he was like a real rock star. I was intimidated and I was the third to go.

We were all sitting up on the stage and so when he got up I thought to myself, okay,

I'm going to use these ten minutes. There's going to be a lot of this twos. I'm just

really going to use it. He got up on the stage, he bowed. He said basically the key to freedom

is intention and attention. He bowed again and he went and sat down and I'm sitting there

like this. Now I have no idea what I said but I remember completely what he said. And so I was,

you know, reflecting this sense of this invitation to wise effort that really intention and

attention. You know, if I look past the last decades and I've been, I've been to so many

different people who got involved with the spiritual path and for those that I've kind

of traveled with friends and so on that got involved in the early days, there are many

people that have plateaued in different ways. They've kind of gotten habitual and you know,

it's still helping them with stress and so on. There's not a sense of that adventure into the

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