So tonight I'd like to talk about the main reason that most people in the West come to

meditation, which is something in them goes, you know, I'm really stressed out. And then I

really need to do something about this. And stress is the word that for most Westerners

gets us in the meditation door. More generally, the Buddha described stress in terms of duka,

which really means unsatisfactoriness. So stress is this tension that comes with all living

organisms. We all have it. It's duka's this tension. And it gives us the feeling that in some way,

something's missing. Something's not quite right in this moment or something's wrong. It's one

of those two. And it leaves us restless. We're not rather than kind of sitting and being and living

right here. When we're stressed, we tense up and we start leaning forward. Are we start looking

back, but we're unable to inhabit our bodies and our hearts and our beings. Okay. So that's the theme,

the undercurrent of any tension, slash, stress, duka, is a sense that this being is separate

and threatened. Something's not right. Okay. The Buddha talked about this and said, okay,

as soon as that comes up, on some level, our system goes into holding on to things and pushing

things away. In some way, there's attraction, there's aversion. We go into reactivity. And that

much of our life is lived in this trance of reactivity that's very rare moments where we're in that

still point that we're just here. I talked to a friend of mine yesterday who's really happy. And he's

happy that kind of happiness for no reason happy. He's really very free inside. And he just kept saying,

you know, it's like whatever's happening, it's enough. You know. So that's when we're not,

that's the freedom that's possible. So we're going to explore that a bit. And one of the

things that many times you'll find in the trauma literature and beyond is a description of how

wild animals deal with stress. And you often will hear about lions and gazelles. And on one level,

when a lion detects that in a herd of gazelles, one is injured, that sets off stress, wanting,

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