The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist and author.

Good evening and welcome.

So, I start with Namaste again and I'm feeling it a lot, a lot of sense of honoring what's

unfolding, seeing so much presence and so much waking up going on in all of us.

I feel like we're all in it together.

And in a sense tonight's talk is really, if there was a word that captures it for me,

it really is a spirit of Namaste.

It's really how we wake up these hearts to be able to really sense our interconnection

about to that beauty and goodness and sacredness that is living through all beings.

So to talk on the bodhisattva path, bodhi awakening, sattva being and doesn't matter what

religion we are, we're all on that path and we are all awakening beings.

And so the exploration really is tonight, in a sense in a practical way, what are the

trainings or the ways that we pay attention that really help us to evolve on this path.

In particular, that help us to sense our connectedness and live from that.

There's a story that I heard a number of years ago about social activist Fran Pivi and

she's on the Stanford campus and there's some experiment going on with a couple of chimps,

a male chimps and a female chimps and the female chimps on a chain, the male chimps is loose,

but he's being very aggressive and trying to mate with her and all sorts of, a bunch of scientists

and from marine world, we're studying the chimps and they're all kind of circled around and

just kind of watching and so the male's eager and he's kind of grunting and grabbing at the

female's chain and tugging it and she's whimpering and pulling back.

And so this is what Fran writes.

...