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Throughout the meditation world, we hear regularly about the importance of present-centered attention.

And there's one story of a kind of contemporary Buddha figure,

man, person who falls out of a 15-story window.

And as the story goes around the eighth floor, someone sticks their head out and says,

hey, you're doing okay? And this Buddha guy says, well, so far so good.

And what I like about that is that obviously for most of us,

Buddhas to be, Buddhas in training, we're hooked by the anticipation of what's to come.

We don't stay that right here. Rather, we're pretty chronically, especially due to our negativity

bias anticipating that around the corner something is going to go wrong or when we hit bottom,

it's going to be like we're crashing. So we have a real strong tendency and conditioning to worry

and to obsess. And of course, Mark Twain's famous comment, most people know this these days,

the worst things in my life never actually happened. So a lot of that worry and obsessing

is for naught. And this is our predicament that we've moved through a lot of life moments

in the tightness of fear, a lot of life moments. I think many of us can feel in our nervous system

as a society that that the fear and anxiety is spiking right now. Would you agree with that?

Okay, yeah. So the common reaction when greater there's fear, the more

actively and reflexively we go to trying to control things. And then we end up causing trouble

to ourselves and others because rather than feel the fear, we try to control. Okay. Let me just

invite you to check in right from the start. Of course, we'll be doing more reflections as we go,

...