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This is the fourth of a five-week series on the basics of mindfulness meditation, cultivating heart

presence. So we began the first week with the life breath of really coming home to presence

again and again, feeling the inflow and outflow of the breath, letting it be a home base to gather, to collect our attention.

Then we extended a kind of intimate attention to living sensations in the body.

And last week we explored how to open to feelings and emotions.

This week we're going to be looking at waking up from the trance of thinking.

And I speak of it that way because as many of us are aware, we spend much of our time lost

in thought, not aware of the fact of thinking.

There's a story I heard Rabbi Zellman share about his youngest daughter, Shalvi.

She was about five years old at the time.

And according to the story one morning, she woke him up and said,

Father, father, do you know how when you're asleep and dreaming, it seems so real? And then you wake up

and realize it was just a dream? When you're awake, can you wake up that much more and realize

this is just a dream? Wow. So take a moment and think of what it's like when we're dreaming.

I mean, when we're in that mind-generated dream world, it's, we're caught inside feelings and

reactions and perspectives and there's zero choice because there's no conscious

awareness realizing, okay, this is just a dream. And this is what it's like when we're moving

through our day and lost in thoughts and emotional reactivity. We're not realizing we're lost, we're just in it,

and our sense of our being shrinks. We become a small, separate, stuck self without choice.

We're in a dream or a trance and we're mistaking it in those moments for reality.

...