Greetings.

We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference.

To make a donation please visit tarbrock.com.

Namaste and welcome friends.

If you have been intending these gatherings for a number of years you might remember

before the pandemic, we had these live, held in this beautiful church, a unitarian church

in Bethesda, Maryland and I had an altar behind me and on the altar was a Buddha, a statue.

And the story behind this statue is that a friend of mine and I went looking for one in

the streets of Provincetown, Massachusetts and found this in one little shop and this

Buddha statue and really loved it and we were excited to offer it into our community

as a community statue.

And so I remember the first class that I held and it was there and afterwards people came

out to look more closely and I saw them over there standing looking at the statue kind

of like this and a few of them came up and talked with me a bit and said you know I

think the cast of the statues it was done wrong it's leaning to the left and sure enough

and I looked more closely it was truly a leaning Buddha and it turned out this statue became

kind of an icon for the community we called it the Sangha of the leaning Buddha's community

of the leaning Buddha's and it was really helpful that you know we're all imperfect we all

have these imperfect cast and it's kind of a reminder it's not so personal and that

we can hold it with with kindness with forgiveness and it's true I mean we all do have imperfect

past or said differently we all have conditioning that creates the traits we might not like

you know the traits of aggression or defensiveness and security addictive behaviors greed

...