I'd like to begin by telling you about a friend of mine who some years back went to Asia

and practiced for three months in a monastery and towards the end of his time he was increasingly

having a kind of sense of real stillness and open-heartedness. It was a kind of openness

where there wasn't any grasping, any want for anything to be different. There wasn't

a sense of somebody there that was owning the experience or controlling anything, so there's

a real sense of freedom and well-being. And he asked himself, as we well might, it

well, is this enlightenment? You know, it was really his question. And then he went, came

back to the States and spent the holidays with his wife's family and came to the conclusion

it wasn't. But in a way, it wasn't, it wasn't. And I like the way I like to frame it and

many teachers put it this way, is we can have enlightened moments. And for him, they were

what you might say unstable, what allowed that experience to really be in its fullness was a

very structured environment and an intensive practice. But you know, I've heard from many

of you, many people tell me at the end of some of our retreats and even after a class that there

was this time of kind of settleness and our quietness or touching some peace or feeling of this

heart that was not holding back love. And then also I hear people say, and then I started talking

to people or I went home and you know, had a conversation with my husband about, you know,

who was going to drive so and so the school next day. And it all just vanished. So that's what

happens that we touch. And when I consider really valuable, we have a taste sometimes the

freedom of that we're not so self-centered and there's an openness and a presence. And then

because we still have a lot of habits of reacting, we clutch. We move from that non-self-centeredness

and that openness into a very solid kind of sense of, here I am and I'm having a hard time. And

this is what I need to do in our narratives back in action, right? So the defining feature of any

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