I put together a few some thoughts and I thought I just talk a little while and then maybe

we could have a discussion with as much time as you have and I hope that this in some way ties into the topic, if not just put it down to me being some weird tattoos.

I'm not going to be here. In a few months it will all be a blur anyway. So, we human being

a blur anyway. So, we human beings have a great survival advantage, which is our ability to connect.

And actually one of my beefs about my long-term Buddhist practice is that while there's such a great emphasis on the internal work of creating an eternal safe container, there's often not as much of an emphasis on what it means

to deeply connect on a one-on-one level with another individual, which the Buddha actually said throughout there is no

spiritual path without learning to connect with what he called Callianomita, at least in Polly. I'm not sure what it is in

spiritual friend. Yeah, spiritual friend. So

we connect in two ways. The way you're most familiar with in your day-to-day life is, of course,

through the conceptual language-based left hemispheric mind where we can have a conversation and exchange ideas.

And you can even be texting on your phone probably or a bit distracted and you could probably still take in the fact that I'm saying oh I have to do this today what are you doing today blah blah blah the kind of bullet points of life and that's only one very small part of connecting with

another human being. We also connect and what I like to put called the emotional mind. You could view it as just the unconscious right hemisphere, what the Buddha called the Chita, the heart

mind.

There's so many different labels for it.

I like the emotional mind because recently a lot of research shows that the

realm of emotions is essentially the most important feature of this kind of

subconscious connection that we make with each other, the realm of affect or emotions.

That's in our first two years of life after we're born, the way we connect and communicate and manage the attachment between the infant and our

caretaker is through emotions.

We are actually interestingly enough conscious in our right hemisphere the first three or four years of life before we do the great migration from right to left and all of the memories that are that are consciously held are wiped away and only the emotional memories are

held from the first four or five years of life.

And then we switch over to left hemisphere and we start to connect with other people through language.

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