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Welcome, friends. It's a pleasure to be with you. And I wanted to start by honoring you.

Just really the quality of effort and earnestness and dedication to practice. I feel like we're all kind of helping each other along and the atmosphere is just it's sweet and beautiful.

So I wanted to start with a quote. This is Thomas Merton, who once said, of what avail is it?

If we can travel to the moon, if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves, this is the most important of all journeys and without it all the rest are useless.

I'm starting with this because it feels like that's what we're doing that we gather here and in a sense we're crossing the abyss. There's so much conditioning to cut us off from ourselves and cut us off from each other.

And we're in this practice that is really bringing an intimacy with the life that's here. And you could feel that as Jonathan spoke yesterday, this such a powerful talk on meeting difficulty, all those challenging weather systems, befriending, you know, the wings of mindfulness and kindness.

And then the beautiful meta meditations yesterday with Devon and then just now with with law that really keep inviting us into this heart space into really embracing ourselves and naturally finding how it extends outward.

So I had a yoga teacher long, long, long time ago and she taught this in slightly a different way than we're doing here. She and these are the instructions she'd give she'd say, put your left arm over your right and hug yourself.

And then she said, put your right arm over your left and hug your evil twin.

I had no idea what was coming. I was following the instructions, but then I realized, why not? You know, just embrace all parts of ourselves, whatever we consider them to be.

And yet we know that when the difficult weather comes along and you can kind of track how it's been these last days, it's not our first response. It just isn't.

You know, our first responses to either ignore it or think it's in the way of our of the real meditation.

I try to get rid of it. And the most painful is really judging ourselves for it.

This shouldn't be happening. This is a sign of something bad about me. It's my fault.

I was thinking of just today, my last group of the morning, all of us had trouble getting in the room because the link didn't work.

But each of us who are just sharing on how quickly our minds defaulted into, this is about me, it's my failure.

You know, it's just what happens. And many of you are probably familiar with the Buddha talking about this in terms of getting shot by two arrows.

And I find it's so useful to remember this because the first arrow is the painful emotion. Let's say anxiety comes up, you know, something's going wrong. I'm going to miss something.

And then we shoot a second arrow because we're disliking our insecure, anxious, failing self. So we're blaming ourselves for the experience.

And here's the thing, when we're doing a lot of second arrowing. In other words, when it's a habit of judging ourselves, we're creating an abyss that really locks us in suffering.

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