The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist and author.

A friend of mine went to India some years back and he was there practicing meditation intensively for three or four months.

And at one point he said it finally came together for him, where he experienced a really exquisite place of peace and openness and equanimity, real sense of homecoming.

And soon after, and he thought to himself that this is really it, you know, that there's something in touching that now he knew who he was really beyond any kind of separatory, goic or small sense of self.

So it was really something very precious to him.

And as he flew home back to the States and as you know, it's a lot of jet lag, but still there was that sense of knowing.

And so then he and his wife went directly to spend a few days at a family gathering.

Do you know the rest of the story?

He said he felt like he crashed into planet Earth.

He was like he was booted out of the garden. It was very, very humbling.

And I share that because formal meditation practice is a intentionally it's a controlled environment.

And we're very purposely, you know, kind of putting the do not disturb sign on and we are often not answering our iPhone.

And there is some tendons we closing our eyes often.

That's not a rule, but often just to quiet down some.

It's an on purpose, somewhat controlled environment and it's great for training.

And daily life has a number of different currents that reach us that can easily tug us around, right?

So we can move from being in that quietness and it doesn't matter whether we've been at a month-long retreat or a meditation class like this one or maybe at home,

we did our sitting and then got in the car or got in the subway or whatever, but we know what it's like.

There's speed, there's an enormous amount of stimulation and noise, there's emails flooding in that are just dragging us from one state of mind to another.

The advertising, the consuming, it's we're in this world that really does not,

is not in the same kind of flow as sitting quietly and really not being very goal-oriented.

So I've shared with some of you this New Yorker cartoon I really liked where you had tarzan stepping out of his hut and saying to Jane,

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