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So Namaste, friends. Thank you for joining us and really a welcome of course to all of you in the United States, but also so many different countries.

It just always touches me to see where you're joining in from, which means that it can be very late at night.

So I'm grateful and I'm particularly glad to be together this evening.

There's so much emotion, so much intensity, so much difficult intensity, living around these elections here in the United States.

And of course, so many of us knowing that even supposedly when the elections are concluded, there's not an end to the challenges this country and the world is facing so many friends.

So they're imagining that as I speak that there's a range of what you are experiencing for some continued kind of anxiety, fear for some hope, some anger, some maybe feelings of great aversion or hatred, some grief, and a lot more.

So I wanted to kind of write at the beginning pause and just invite you to sense, you know, what has been stirred up in you, what's the most predominant feelings, perhaps that you're experiencing today, these moments.

And I just suggested a meditation, then maybe not these moments, but in general, these last hours.

And what I'd actually like to do is invite you, if you are interested in sharing in the zoom chat, to just put in two words that capture perhaps a good amount of what you're feeling right now.

And I'll be returning back and sharing a bit from what I see on the zoom chat later in the talk. So if you're in the mood, two words that express what you're feeling.

And I think that the inquiry this evening is really how do we hold what we're experiencing, how do we connect to an inner refuge of presence of heart so that we can respond wisely to our hurting world.

And as a phrase, I've always loved from my Burmese meditation teacher, he describes us cultivating a heart that is ready for anything.

A heart that's not dependent on things being a certain way, but really has that openness and power of presence that we're really ready for anything and can respond wisely.

So I just wanted to put that out there as something to keep in mind as we explore together.

I know for myself the lesson, I have to keep learning and relearning and relearning in my own life is that the more things speed up, in other words, the more things feel urgent, where I'm seeking certainty wanting things to be a certain way afraid that they're not going to be that way.

The more in those times, I need to slow down, I need to pause, I need to come back into living presence.

I feel there's a real power to us collectively pausing right now, listening together, sensing what it means to come home to our heart and our awareness.

So tonight I'll speak some and then I'll be doing some, we'll do some reflecting together and open it up to some questions.

I want to begin this talk in a way with a story that just keeps coming back to me and it's about anthropologist Margaret me.

And years ago she was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization of culture and the student expected her to talk about clay pots or tools for hunting, grinding stones religious artifacts, that kind of thing.

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