The following reflection is led by Tara Brock.

To access more of my meditations or reflections, or to join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.

I'd like to start with a mid-Eastern story that I heard some time ago about a man who was falsely accused of as an accriminal and is put in jail.

And a friend came to visit and gave him a prayer rug.

And he was really disappointed because he had wanted a hacksaw or some tools to help him get out.

But you know, so he realized, okay, this is what I got him, I just will use it.

So every day he'd kneel down and bow and pray.

And he started to get more familiar with the pattern that was woven into the rug.

And one day it struck him that the image in the rug was really the diagram of the lock that he could unlock to step into freedom.

So the pathway that frees us, the portal to freedom, is always right here.

It's what we're standing on.

It's this aliveness in our body that's right here.

It's just what's going on.

And probably the biggest solution in the world is that it's something down the road that we have to wait to learn and get and so on.

Right here, the prayer rug, right under our feet.

And what's so interesting is when you consider it is that everything we experience, a sense of fear, sense of joy, excitement, whatever, it's always registered in this living body.

So if we want to enter reality, true reality, absolutely have to experience aliveness in our body.

It's the way.

The Buddha said, it's through this fathom-long body that we experience the whole universe.

And Kabir put it this way, the God that I seek is within.

As we begin to honor and tend to the body in a present way, we actually increase our level of vitality and aliveness.

I've seen people that come to week-long retreats where we're over and over again coming back, feeling the life of the body,

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