The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

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Here we go. Great. Hello, hello everyone. Hello and welcome to Happy Hour. Delighted to be with you, delighted to be back.

And yeah, just having said hello and shared our goodwill with the

song and received one another is is a way is our way of warming the

space with kindness. So maybe one one story I want to share to set the setting to set the,

to set the, yeah, the, as a preamble for our practice today together is this.

So, so on the journey that I was on for the past couple of weeks visiting many of the sites where the Buddha was born and in Nepal,

in Lumbini Nepal where he awakened under the Bodhi tree in

Buttgaya where he died etc etc. One of the sites was actually quite touching for me and I want to bring that story in.

Because it's quite relevant to our practice here at Happy Hour, the practices of the heart. So many of you might have

heard the story and I certainly have heard it before but relating it to in a different way that so the Buddha was before he became enlightened he was practicing austerity. He was basically starving to him, starving himself,

apparently living on one grain of rice per day, and really mortifying himself. And at the time he was a young man about 35 years old and he was really

Enlightenment or bust so and as we can see that sometimes in in in

perhaps in in our own youth or in our youthfulness that we push, we push, so he almost died.

He almost died, sleeping on nails, not eating, standing on one foot, just doing these really aesthetic practices that he had learned

from his teachers before finding the way and and sitting in caves where there was no light, no nature, no support of the beauty of nature.

And then he feels that this is not the way, so he walks out and he passes out at some point in a town

Urela I remember the name right anyway and and as he passes out from hunger being initiated he's given rice pudding by a young girl,

a 13 year old girl called Sujeta and basically he survives because of the kindness

because of the compassion of this this young woman and hearing the story something else revealed itself to me so

imagining if you were the Buddha if you were being, it was really determined to wake up to find answers to this existential angst of what is this life? What is this thing? You know, we are born, we age, we die, we suffer, there's love, there's loss, and you're so

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