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So welcome and Namaste friends. Thank you so much for being here with us. This talk is part two of a talk on fear of aging and more broadly, the vulnerability that comes with impermanence with loss.

The basic understanding is that how we relate to the reality of change really determines our freedom, our happiness, our capacity to love deeply and to touch peace.

When I say how we relate, what I mean is to the degree that we meet the vulnerability of impermanence with wakefulness with an open accepting presence, that will really translate into the richness and depth of our lives.

For most of us, even if we don't want to go back in time, we do live with fear about what's ahead.

This basic fear is the fear of loss. It's the fear and pain that comes with losing loved ones, perhaps losing a sense of being relevant or important to others, being significant in the world.

It's the pain and fear around loss of our own body and health, our appearance, the pain and fear that comes with losing physical abilities, mental capacities, losing a sense of independence.

We also might have the fear, many people do, of missing out on living fully. Many feel this kind of sense that something's missing. I'm not really living my life. I'm skimming the surface or stuck in depression or caught in addiction.

It's a sense of not living true to what matters and the fear that I'll die without having really lived.

We forget that everyone we meet is navigating with a nervous system that's perceiving these kind of existential fears.

We learn in daily life, pain in our body triggers that existential fear. The stress of deadlines.

I recently found out the historical meaning of deadline is the line that was drawn around prisons that demarcated if an inmate went past that line, they'd be shot.

So daily life, deadlines, we also have a fear in our daily life of failing and work and relationships.

If you think about it for early humans, failure, being rejected from the tribe was a certain form of death.

So daily experience can easily trigger a very deep sense of being a threatened, insecure, separate self.

And some can be very well defended from that vulnerability, from feeling it, but deep down, we're all rigged to feel that kind of insecurity.

So the doctor comes out of a long surgery to report status of the patient to his wife, and he goes, and this is what he says he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's fine resting, etc, etc.

You know, just once it would be nice if someone asked how I was doing.

So everybody is living with a nervous system, a system that's nervous, that's afraid of what's coming that's insecure.

You know, I found for myself that when I pause, often when I pause, and I deepen my attention, and I'm slowing down right now to do it, I'll notice a kind of background, homophere.

Sometimes it's in the form of restlessness, like I want to get away from this, you know, and always it's a fear of what's to come in some way, tensing against what's around the corner.

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