The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist and author.

Good evening and Namaste. On opening night I mentioned our statue here, our

leaning Buddha. I'm wondering how many of you checked it out to see if it really

was leaning. Anyone? Yeah, I thought so. Well, we got it. A friend of mine from our

community in Washington and I found it and we were really happy with the look of it and

brought it to the Wednesday night class and the first and we kind of unveiled it. And I

remember after class seeing people standing in front of it and they were all kind of going

like this. So it was a surprise and a first, you know, I thought, oh no, I can't believe

I got a bad Buddha. But you know, for some of us we're thinking of renaming IMCW to the

song of the leaning Buddha's or something because I mean, think of it. You know, it's quite

symbolic to have this mold that's just not perfect and still so what? It's just, you

know, the spirit shines through. And so this is pretty much pointing to the theme of tonight,

which is that when we suffer, it's because in some way we're making the mold, the conditioning,

the weather that's moving through us wrong, that we've got in our body and in our mind

a sense that I shouldn't be like this and life shouldn't be like this. In other words,

it's described as we're kind of at war with reality. It's not okay the way it is. I remember

Washington Post offers these awards for different T-shirt titles. In one year, the T-shirt of the

year was, I have occasional delusions of adequacy. Then there's this cartoon with a dog at the

psychiatrist's office and he's saying, it's always good dog this and good dog that, is it ever

great dog? So you get the idea. So there's this sense of something's wrong.

I was very moved some years ago, a story that Sylvia Borstein shared about the power of the practice

of meta, of being able to see past the mask and see the goodness. She described the experience of a

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