Maybe before we begin the formal class, I invite you to take a mindful pause.

Take a moment to let your attention go inward and close your eyes and just make yourself

at home in this moment.

As part of this homecoming depressions, just to notice what it's like, the sensations

in your body and whatever mood or emotions might be here.

So without any judgment, just noticing life as it is right here and relaxing with what's

happening.

Let's take a moment to let your attention go inward and close your eyes.

So welcome to our second session of the Art and Science of Meditation.

As a brief review, the first gathering really was to explore how meditation can be a path

of awakening from trance and I use the language of trance a lot because we spend many moments

of our lives in some story of a small and separate self on our way somewhere else.

And there's not that many moments of a full sense of right here right now.

The meditations are practice of coming back, of coming home right to this moment, to

what I sometimes describe as our natural awareness.

In the last session, we talked about the golden Buddha or that light, that awareness that's

always and already here, but we forget about.

And the Buddha described our suffering really in terms of forgetting that we forget who

we are, that we get caught in some way wanting life to be different.

The sense that this moment should be different than it is that something's missing, that

something's wrong.

So part of this practice of mindfulness is noticing that and arriving again and again.

...