This class and the next class I'll be doing are called the Basics of Meditation.

And they're really designed not just for people that are new, but for those of us maybe

that have been doing it a really long time and want to be fresh and how we're approaching

meditation because the great shadow side of practice is that we get habitual. So with

that in mind, one of the questions I get a lot and I just was interviewed a few months

ago and I was asked is, so how come meditation is so popular? And something in me has a

kind of good news, bad news response, which is the bad news is people are so stressed.

We are so speedy a culture. There is so much anxiety and depression that there's a

real yearning for something that can help us to slow down and come back and be here for

our lives. There's a sense I hear from people. It's kind of like we're on the surface

racing to the finish line and what do you get at the finish line, death and not dropping

into our moments. So that's the, it's not bad news, but there's a kind of sense of there's

a lot of suffering. And the good news is when I really sense this that there's an evolutionary

unfolding going on whereby there's more and more of a sense of what's possible.

But it's really possible to touch a great freedom, that happiness, that loving without

holding back, that really living from our fullness is possible and then there's this yearning

to find the ways of paying attention that allow us to really live from our fullest. So

I find that there's both of those, there's elements in it and it's always interesting

to me, I think of it like exercise that just the way exercise, exercising the body makes

us more healthy. Exercising the mind works, it really does. And there's now probably

over 10,000 pieces of really good research that are showing the benefits of meditation

on everything, on the benefits on our physical health, on our immune system, on sleep disorders,

...