Tonight, I'd like to start with a story that I heard many years ago, and I just read

a version of it that I really like written by Sufi teacher Andrea Shaw, and it's about

a tensmith who was in justly imprisoned, and he made a miraculous escape. And years later,

when he was asked how he was able to do this, he described that his wife, who's a weaver,

weaved him a prayer rug, and in the prayer rug was the design of the lock of his prison door.

And so he, the way he got out was that he convinced the jellers to give him a little tool so he could

make different trinkets that they would go and sell and make money on. And of course, he used

those tools to, in some way, help him to create a key based on the design, and he was able to

free himself. Okay? So the message here is that if we understand the design of the lock,

we then know how to design the key to our freedom. And this is very much to do with our spiritual

path, the understanding being that each one of us in some way to the degree we suffer,

we're living in a distorted reality. And if we can begin to understand the shape of that

distortion, what are the beliefs that we're buying into that are keeping us trapped?

If we can understand the shape or the patterns of our own behaviors and emotions and beliefs,

in that recognition, we begin to free ourselves.

So maybe just to begin with the genesis of these beliefs that really, if we're not free,

we're believing in some beliefs that are limiting us. And our core beliefs, and the core of

the beliefs are the ones that really are set in from very early on and really are impacting us

all the time. These core beliefs are based on our earliest and most potent fears, our earliest

and most potent fears. And the way our mind works is that we use the past to anticipate the future.

So these survival brains are biased to latch on to remember imprint the painful experiences.

That's the way, that's the way it happens. We encode the memories that are most painful,

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