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

Namaste and welcome.

I'd like to begin just a bit of a personal biographical which is that when I first entered

college I was planning to go to law school.

That was my trajectory and when I left I moved into an ashram.

So something happened.

And what happened was I in my senior year started doing yoga and meditation and it was a

radical dramatic shift and I moved to decide the most important thing in life was to spiritually

wake up.

And so I moved into an ashram which is a spiritual community and lived in a spiritual community

for 10, 11 years.

And the reason and what kept me as part of that community so long besides the fact that

I loved my fellow community members was we had a practice, it's called a sadanas, spiritual

practice where we'd get up at 3.30 in the morning and we'd start with a cold shower and

then we'd spend two and a half hours doing yoga and meditating and praying and chanting.

And by the end of those two and a half hours it didn't matter what mood I was in when

I began.

My heart was open.

It just didn't matter what was going on.

And a key element for me that opened my heart was the chanting because the chanting there

was no way that my highly active mental processes could compete.

They just kind of quiet down and I literally there was going from the head to the heart.

...