Greetings. I'm Tara Brock and I'd like to welcome you to these podcasts. While the

talks and meditations are offered freely, we'd very much appreciate your support. To

make a donation or learn more about my schedule, please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org.

Thank you.

Again, welcome and namaste. I'd like to start this talk with a poem by the poet Tukaram.

He writes, I was meditating with my cat the other day and all of a sudden she shouted,

what happened? I knew exactly what she meant, but encouraged her to say more, feeling that

if she got it all out on the table, she'd sleep better that night. So I responded, tell

me more dear and she saw fully me out. Well, I was mingled with the sky. I was calm

it's whizzing here and there. I was suns and heat. Hell, I was galaxies, but now look,

I'm landlocked in fur. To this I said, I know exactly what you mean. What to say about

conversation between mystics. Many I suspect have this sense of being caught in a kind of

smallness of self, kind of stuck in a self and yet also intuiting a sense of what we

are that's much vaster, more mysterious. And so we live with this kind of paradox of getting

caught in the conditioning of a limited sense of what we are and also attuning and sensing

at times how much more there is. And so it was the yearning for me of realizing that

a greater mystery that got me to move into an ashram when I was 21 right after I graduated

from college. And to move from that kind of free willing life of the mid 70s to in a

very, very disciplined kind of ashram life where I'd be wearing, we wore white garb and

turbines and got up at 3 30 in the morning each morning and took cold showers and meditated

and did yoga for 2 and a half hours. And it was very, very structured and disciplined.

And it was also rather exotic in the sense of chanting Sanskrit mantras and the whole lifestyle

...