Tonight's a little bit different than our regular classes.

A couple of times a year I like to make some space for whatever questions are in the room

and tonight's one of those nights where we'll have a mic and any questions you might have

percolating about your practice or anything you've been hearing in here, you're invited

to ask that.

I thought I'd start, I'll speak for maybe ten or fifteen minutes just to set a context

for this and I'd like to speak a bit about the art and science of our practice.

So as many of you know the science of meditation, what it does, it's a fact is getting a lot

more attention in the press and it's particularly because of science, you know, the research community.

I think it's been over ten thousand studies in the last ten years or something, just huge.

Like on every campus students are scrambling to do mindfulness research.

So we put up on Facebook last week what I thought was one of really wonderful TEDx on,

it was done by Judson Brewer who's a Yale researcher and also a meditator.

And his title was, you're already awesome, just get out of your own way.

So in honor of Judd and tonight's little mini talk is called, just get out of your own

way and really it's quite a profound Dharma teaching.

I mean they have shown in brain scans what happens when we're no longer distracted

and there's a, you know, quality of presence and how the parts of the brain that light

up are correlated to positive emotions, to intuition, to empathy, in other words,

parts of the left-frontal cortex light up.

So we're finding out more and more, and this to me is the good news of the spiritual paths,

that we all have, the Buddhists call it Buddha nature, we all have this natural intelligence

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