Hello and welcome to another edition of Mindfulness Plus.

I'm your host Thomas McConkey.

Thank you for downloading us.

So for those of you new to Mindfulness Plus, we're in

season two. The structure of the show, the intention of the show is really simple. I have been in

this practice for 20 years, meditation, human development, transformation. And really at the heart of the practice is this premise that if we change the way we pay attention to our life moment to moment,

our life will change in really powerful ways.

So this is a show about paying attention to how we're paying attention and to pay attention in new ways.

And we have a lot of help from the wise elders, our ancestors, or forebears in the wisdom traditions.

So I really like to draw as widely as I can from the different wisdom

traditions that give us beautiful pointing out instructions. Today, in point of fact, we're working

with the tradition of the desert mothers and fathers, the Abbas and the Amas. And this is a band of contemplatives, meditators, not unlike ourselves, that headed out into the desert

as Christianity was becoming the official state religion of Rome in the early 4th century.

They felt like something precious was being lost as Christianity was being popularized, institutionalized, routinized.

So it's a fascinating collection of texts if you're interested.

Today I just want to share a brief excerpt from Aba Joseph, one of the prominent desert fathers of the tradition,

and then to offer a little commentary, a little opportunity to reflect, and then some meditation, some direct experience.

So I will read.

This is Aba Joseph, who lived at the end of the fourth century,

into the early fifth century. This is Logion 7, or for our purposes, we can just say verse 7 from his text. Aba Lott, this is one of his students, one of his contemporaries.

Aba Lott went to see Aba Joseph and said to him,

Abba, as far as I can, I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate.

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