So welcome, everybody. It's nice to see you all and it's such a joy to practice together. It's a beautiful thing.

To have people come together and practice and share and so with my co-teachers with all of you, it's just really great.

I'm happy to be here, so thank you.

I'll start with a little bit, kind of very high level summary of on Thursday just two days ago. I gave a little

talk about like these two levels of freedom with respect to fear. That is there's freedom within the experience of fear,

like just recognizing that fear arises, but it doesn't mean we have to lose all our freedom there.

And so one way that we can work with it and have the freedom within the experience of fear

is to allow as best we can the fear and the resistance to the fear to be there, to stop pushing it away,

to stop turning away or to stop imagining or trying to make it go away in some other way.

And what a really great support to allow the fear and the resistance, the fear to be there is mindfulness of the body.

Mindfulness of the experience of fear of the lump in the throat, the uncomfortableness

and the gut, maybe the tension in the shoulders, and or the

resistance to the fear, and this is often how I'm practicing is the

resistance to that fear, this sense of like no, the sense of go away.

I don't want this to be here.

And that often is a tightness in the jaw.

For many people, this is like a tightness in the jaw that we don't often recognize or can be some tightness in the shoulders or the neck or something like this. So that's freedom within fear and then there's freedom from fear that is to create the conditions in our lives in which the freedom isn't, or I'm sorry the fear isn't arising, the freedom is arising and the fear isn't arising and the fear isn't and this

includes some sense of gatheredness or collectedness,

boldness of the mind and the body, some calmness and non-destruction, we might say, as well as, of course, awakening.

The Buddha himself didn't have fear as an awakened person.

So to move this direction towards greater and greater

awakening is to move in the direction of greater fear.

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