Today I wanted to begin by sharing that as many of you know we just got back from one

of our retreats, it was our spring retreat and one of the experiences I have as you know

bearing witness to people moving through retreats. As I see folks at the beginning and they come

in road weary and bedraggled and we have our first interviews on groups that meet and share

on Saturdays and you can just feel the stress of life and the anxiety and the self-criticism that's

you know kind of really entangling minds and hearts. At the end I look around and I see you know

all these different bodies and faces but this same kind of shine coming through and it's got the

spirit of a confidence or a faith that has been deepened or strengthened and it's really beautiful

because what people find is that through the retreat it wasn't all pleasant it was a mix but

that through that time by being present they discovered they could handle the ups and downs. One

student put it this way that after a real roller coaster she said that the real gift, the real

learning, the real freedom is in getting real that we just are real with ourselves.

So I was reflecting on this because one of the great gifts of the path is this confidence.

Perhaps more than what we might think of as happiness, this faith, this confidence that we can

handle life gives us the freedom in the moment that we're not tensing against what's around the

corner. And the Buddha described faith as really the beginning of all good things. It's the first

of the spiritual faculties that he described that both awakens us and energizes us and also

expresses our wisdom. Now we all have some faith. I mean you wouldn't be here if you didn't have

some sense of possibility, some intuitive sense of something possible, some growth, some unfolding

that was possible. You wouldn't be here, you wouldn't be listening if you're one of the people

if you didn't have some faith in that. When that faith is full blown, the Tibetans have a name

for it and it's called the lion's roar. The lion's roar and I love that. I love the term and I'll

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