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Thank you for being here.

So this is part two of imprisoned by our stories, a two-part series that I have chosen from the

archives.

And I wanted to share that some years back I was talking with a young man at the end of a

mindfulness retreat.

And through the week, he had gotten in touch with intense fear, with buried grief, with anger, also had moments

of deep peace as he was sipping cup of tea, sense of wonder while walking outside.

He had touched into this open-heartedness and tenderness to life. When he left, he said he was

leaving with a very important understanding.

And the way he put it, the joy isn't getting real. The joy isn't getting real.

We can't discover that joy if life is perpetually filtered by thoughts, judgments, plans,

and stories. And that's the power of doing a meditation retreat. That's the center

of meditation practice, is waking up from the trance of thinking. And the Buddha talked about it sometimes as living in a waking dream,

and he advised us to take the world of concepts in two hands and drop it.

He also said that people with strong opinions just go around bothering one another,

which I think is a great quote. And when I looked

it up, it's really there. It's the gist in the Buddhist scriptures. It's slightly paraphrased. But

when we cling to our stories, we're at odds with others and we're at odds with truth. So this is

from a much more contemporary source. It is true. As we go through

life-thinking heavy thoughts, thought particles tend to get caught between the ears, causing

...