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Namaste and welcome. I begin tonight with one of my favorite stories that took place

in 2001 and this was three weeks before the Twin Powers were bombed in New York.

There was a conference that I attended in the Twin Powers. I still have the little pen that I took from the building.

It was a Buddhist conference and I was asked to help open the conference with six other or five other teachers and they were all elders.

I was by far the young end of the spectrum in my Dharma experience and I was also the only woman and I was really nervous about this.

This was stressing me out. We had ten minutes each and we were asked to address really the question of what is it that most helps to serve awakening and freedom.

We had ten minutes to riff on that one and I was a second person in line and I thought that's great.

I get a chance to compose and collect and so on but I get the thing done with.

The first person who went up there was Richard Baker-Roshi who was Suzuki-Roshi's Dharma heir, very well known and beloved.

He gets up there to do his talk and he said, awakening comes down to two things. Intention and attention.

Thank you very much.

I know all of a sudden, like, oh my god, I'm on. I'm sorry I was done and frozen and I got up and I have no idea what I said.

I wish I had said, like he said, but I did remember what he said, that awakening comes down to intention, that we have a conscious heart intention to be free, which then guides our attention to presence, intention and attention.

The Buddha said that our entire life arises on the tip of intention. It's a very powerful statement that whatever in a deep way or motivation is, that's going to determine what we think, say, do and our destiny.

So, this evening's reflection is really how we remember and live from our deepest intention.

I often explore this at the beginning of a year because many people use beginnings as a time to refresh and reconnect.

And we also know how inevitably for most of us, the intention becomes kind of compartmentalized and how often we forget and it doesn't become a living part of our day.

So really that's the exploration. How do we bring these alive?

When Zen teacher put it this simply, he said, the most important thing is remembering the most important thing.

These Zen folks have a way of doing that, you know. But when we remember, we're aligned with our hearts. And as we know, when we forget, it's because we're stressed and then we go into some sort of a flinch reactivity.

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