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Welcome and Namaste, friends. It's really great to be with you. The title of this talk

is Being Embodied and this is part two, two part talk. I started the first last week.

I thought I'd maybe start by sharing that in recent days I'd become really immersed

in Hikou. This morning I was going for my river walk and I was composing and really

inside it. I walked right into a massive spider web. I got totally slimed by it. I was

wondering if you were like 200 feet away watching somebody. That was me. Of course, I was

actually writing a Hikou in my mind about spider webs. Just such a reminder, it really

makes a difference to stay awake in our bodies for ourselves, for spiders, for other creatures.

The last week when I spoke, I really talked about we are a disembodied culture. By disembodied,

we habitually seek safety and control by living in our thoughts. We're disconnected from

the wilderness, the wildness of these living bodies and we inhabit a virtual world for huge

swaths of the time. If you just review any particular day or the last few hours, it's

pretty easy to see how much we're gone. There's huge suffering that arises from this fundamental

disconnecting when it's habitual. When we're disconnecting from our bodies, it's also

from others. We can't really be intimate with each other. We consider the world more

as an object and our body as an object to operate upon, but there's not a real sense of

communion or connection. That actually leads to feeling like we can violate others because

they seem unreal, especially when they're at a distance and it leads to destroying our

living earth. Huge suffering. One of the initial insights of mindfulness practice is just

realizing how much we leave, how much we're leaving presents and lost and worrying and

...