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I often use the word trance in talking about this whole path of waking up in recognition

that we spend huge swaths of time in a kind of virtual reality where we're thinking

time traveling, thinking about the future in the past and not actually awake right here

in our senses. And yet, pretty much everything we most value, when you think about it, feeling

love, we have to be in our bodies, wisdom, we have to be here to directly contact reality,

creativity, the things we most value require being awake in our senses. And so what I'd like

to explore in this class and in the following one really is this the pathway to full embodiment.

It's what in Buddhism is described as the first foundation of mindfulness that everything

else arises out of our capacity to really be at home and awake in this living body.

And so what we need to love life, celebrate life, really live it fully. There's a story

that an art professor told about a conversation with her daughter, her daughter was seven,

and she asked this woman, you know, one day what she did at work, and the art professor

told her well, because she worked at a college, she said, well, I teach students how to draw.

And the daughter looked really bewildered and she said, you mean they forgot? And I often

think about how our bodies know how to draw and to sing and to dance and they know how

to be sexual and how to give birth and they know how to heal and they know how to die.

They know all of this. We know how to mourn and we know how to celebrate. And the given

is that we leave our bodies regularly and there is a forgetting. The poet and philosopher

Donna Hues said that our bodies know they belong to this life, belong to spirit. It's our

minds that make us so homeless. So this isn't a diatribe against thought because as they

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