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I'm a stay and welcome friends. It's good to be with you.

So our reflection today is on purposefully cultivating loving kindness.

And in composing, I was remembering, I was probably my first introduction and I happened

to be in a yoga class. I was 19 years old and the yoga teachers that put your right arm

over your left and hug yourself. And we did that. And then she said, and put your left arm

over your right and hug your evil twin. Well, so we all thought that was pretty comical

and also as it turns out, it was quite valuable to embrace ourselves in those ways. Many of you

are familiar with the poly word meta and meta is very central in Buddhist teachings.

It means loving kindness, it means friendliness, benevolence. One with meta has unconditional

goodwill towards all. And so so meta is this heart energy of warmth and openness and brightness

that really awakens as we realize our belonging to each other and to all of life.

So I really love the origin story really. When the Buddha first taught meta to the monks

that were with them, and they had been out in the forest meditating and they had encountered

these tree spirits. And these tree spirits had been offended by the presence of the monks.

They felt kind of invaded. And so they tried to scare them off and were successful. They

had the scared them off with these frightening sights and shrieks and terrible smells and

so on. So the monks went back to the Buddha, you know, very, very frightened and said,

please send us to some other forest. We don't want to go back there. And he refused. He

said, no, this is really important that you go back. But here's your protection. And

that's when he taught them the loving kindness practice, the meta practice. And so they went

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