As you know, meditation is becoming sufficiently mainstream that we have tons of paraphernalia

now.

That's all sorts of t-shirts and necklaces and so on and one of the necklaces is this

bone shape that has on it and you can put it on a cord and it says sit, stay, heal.

So I think that was really good.

We know that whether it's now in psychology or whether it's in spiritual teachings, meditation

that the invitation is to presence.

Again and again you're invited to come back here and awaken to what's right here knowing

that this is the portal and what we find initially and people report this when they first

start coming to classes is really kind of excited, this new friend of the breath and

the sense of oh in the midst of troubled waters I have an anchor and it feels really good

and then pretty soon coming into the here and now gets challenging.

They find it's hard to stay, you know, and it's not always pleasant to stay and sometimes

it's even really boring to stay.

So what I found is there's this kind of love, hate relationship with presence that there's

an understanding that if we stick it out there's an intuition that there's a profound

freedom possible but it's really difficult.

I mean consider the instructions you get from meditation, okay you're invited to come

into stillness, you're invited to relax and usually it's described as just relax, you

know, like that's easy and then to follow the breath and just stay there with the breath.

Not a chance, right?

I mean that doesn't happen.

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