Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus.

I'm your host Thomas Mconki.

Thanks so much for listening today. I feel a lot of excitement as we are approaching this topic today, this area of practice. And really, I don't know if it's like COVID, if it's like me being quarantined all day every day, that I'm just like brimming with excitement

to record a Mindfulness Plus episode. I think what it is is that I just love this path and I love

this practice. And it's so fun to get to share it with people who are also passionate about it.

When we really take up this path, this path of transformation, which the world's

wisdom traditions point us to in unique and elegant ways, when we do this, it changes the very

substance of our being. It is exciting stuff. So I maintain today that is why I'm excited because the content

and the possibility, what we are meant to become is inherently exciting, in my opinion. Okay,

where are we going? We're going to talk a little interior castle today from San Teresa

of the 16th century, a Spanish nun, famous, really one of the more renowned Christian mystics

of the entire history of Christianity. And then we're going to talk about the ox-herding

pictures, Shi Niao Tu.

This is, this particular poem is selected from 12th century China, the Zen tradition.

Okay.

So why did I pick these two kind of snippets from the traditions?

Well, being a longtime student practitioner devotee of both Christianity and Buddhism,

I am always struck when I see significant overlap in the way some of the realized masters are

talking about the path of transformation. When I see that overlap, it tells me that I should

slow down and really pay attention because two people who had completely different worldviews,

who never spoke to each other in the body of flesh, they seem to be

looking at something remarkably similar in the transformative process. So it's an opportunity to

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