Welcome my friends. We have a guest tonight, Elizabeth Lesser, who is the co-founder of Omega

Institute, a best-selling author and friend. And she's going to be leading us in a meditation.

You'll find it in her newest book, A Sandra Speaks. And I think you'll really love it.

So Elizabeth, a warm welcome. Thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you for having me. I was saying to Tara and her team before we started that it's slightly intimidating to lead a meditation to a group who's used to Tara, who is one of my favorite meditation teachers.

You know, I've met so many over my years at Omega Institute. And lots of them. I love so many teachers, but it's the rare teacher who is both powerful and strong in her teaching, but so vulnerable and real.

So I just feel honored to be with all of you and to be leading this meditation. And it's not a Buddhist terminology, although it comes from a Buddhist tradition.

I call this practice the Do No Harm, but take no shit meditation. And I'm going to explain to you why in the world I would call a meditation practice Do No Harm, but take no shit.

So that phrase comes from a needle point embroidery that I found in my sister's office after she had died.

And this was my younger sister who had cancer and we became extremely close in the last year of her life, not just only because I was taking care of her, but also because I was her bone marrow donor, which means that by the end of her life, we were sharing all of our blood.

We had the same blood, the same DNA. And as we spent more and more time together, we started to learn so much from each other, almost becoming each other.

And my sister was a nurse practitioner and a very no nonsense person. And she always told me that my work in her estimation was wo wo voodoo.

Because she was a nurse and all a holistic health stuff and the meditation stuff, she just found it way over her head.

But as she was getting sick and dying, she wanted to learn how to meditate.

And the practice that I taught her that she loved the most was based on this iconography from Buddhism.

Maybe you've seen these statues, they're all the rage now when people's gardens where the monk or the Buddha or Kwanian has one hand in the Abaya Mudra, the Abaya gesture.

This is the gesture of fearlessness. And one hand in the Verada gesture, which is the gesture of compassion and holding the pain of the world in your hand, the capacity to feel everything.

So my sister loved doing this meditation, meditating while having her hands in this gesture. And after she died, I was going through her belongings.

And I came upon that needle point that said, do no harm, but take no shit.

And suddenly I thought, wow, do no harm, but take no shit. It's a good way for us Westerners to relate to this way of being both strong and open and soft at the same time.

And you know, health practitioners take that oath. It's called the Hippocratic oath to do no harm. Doctors and nurses take that oath. But as a nurse, my sister had to take a lot of shit.

A lot, you know, nurses just take it all. And so I think this idea for her really appealed to her that, yeah, she was going to do no harm, but she needed to have this too.

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