Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference.

To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste, welcome, friends. This is our third week of the introductory series to mindfulness.

And as many are aware, mindfulness is being taught,

it's being taught and embraced really in so many parts of our society,

hospitals and prisons and schools and businesses and athletic teams.

And often it takes on a very Western character.

I remember seeing a cartoon with a group of monks on the National Mall.

And the head, you know, the leader of the monks is saying, what do we want? Mindfulness. When do we want it? Now.

You know, and everybody's chanting. And you can get that sense that even with the practices

of meditation and mindfulness, we can insert in it a sense of trying to make progress

and make it fast.

So I mostly am bringing this up because if you're feeling any impatience or judgment about

how it's going for you, you can write that up to the driven character of our society, hopefully let go.

You can trust that mindfulness is like a muscle, that it gets stronger with practice.

So the understanding of mindfulness training is that it's really a fresh way of relating

to experience, meeting what arises with presence, with heart presence, and really becoming

that ocean, that larger space of awareness that can include the waves but not react or be controlled by the waves

of our experience. And we're exploring this path with the recognition that in current times,

the waves are intense. They're intense. We're in a kind of collective limbic hijack and that meaning that

fear and anger, anxiety, blame, hatred, it's running strong. The currents are really strong

and they can easily take over. So when they do, we lose access really to the depth and goodness

of who we are. We lose access to presence and to the sense of belonging to each other.

...