Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference.

To make a donation, please visit tarbrock.com.

So good evening again. When the Dalai Lama speaks, he has a refrain that many of you are familiar with,

which is that nobody wants to suffer and everybody wants to be happy. And a core ingredient to that happiness

is a sense of belonging. And if that word doesn't work for you, it's a sense of connectedness, of being a part of.

The word belonging really implies that what we are is more than this separate egoic self that we're a part of this

aliveness and awareness in this world. And there's a story about belonging that I wanted to share with you that was written by Mark Vendoren.

He says, a boy named Eddie Shell came one afternoon to play with Frank and me and at the hour for going home did not know how to do so.

This is a melody that afflicts all children, but my mother was not sure how she should handle it in Eddie's case.

She consulted us secretly as to whether he should be asked to stay for supper.

We thought not, so she hinted to him that his mother might be expecting him.

He was so slow in acting upon the hint that we were all in despair and began to feel guilty because we hadn't pressed him to stay.

What I remember now is Eddie standing at last on the other side of the screen door and trying to say goodbye as if he meant it.

My mother said, warmly, well, Eddie, come and see us again. We're up on the open the door and walked in.

We, the moments that matter to us the most of the moments when there's something that falls away and we just feel that sense of being at home.

And the reason that we long to belong is because the truth is that we do belong.

When we feel that experience of being at one with we're really living from the truth of our being just as the trees belong in the woods, we're part of this living web.

So it's an at home kind of quality.

I'd like to invite you just even before I go more to do a brief belonging scan, which means close your eyes for a moment.

And just this is a way of checking and sensing what's your quality of at home this will be a new word and our vocabulary here.

To maybe explore feel your body and sense of my at home right now in my body and my inhabiting it apart with this aliveness that's right here.

There's our belonging to the body and aliveness.

...