The topic of our reflections or the theme tonight is both very mundane in some ways and

profound, which is stress, stress, stress, and how the quality of presence that we're

cultivating can actually transform our experience into one that's liberating, but really how

we work with stress. And it's really a seasonal talk, and it may be that not everyone here

has this, but with the day shortening and holiday that coming up that has everything so much

to do with consuming and speeding up and traffic. And I think it's partly for me because

I'm on a built-in more than I used to be, that I'm noticing it. Halloween. I spent a lot

of years where I was, my biggest angst was getting the right amount of candy. Like getting

too much, I always felt like what a fool I am, and it felt so wasteful, and getting too

little and seeing the disappointed looks on those innocent faces, you know, when they

got too candy kisses, you know. So, and then the pounds of stuff I've never buy from

my son, my dog would die if they ate, you know, that I'm handing out, so that was the

stress for me. But it's more than Halloween and it's more than the holidays. There's

something that just, when we speed up, I've said many times in here, shared that this

Chinese syllable for speed is heart-killing. That's the meaning of it, and Thomas Merton

talks about the pace of our culture, our speed as a kind of violence, a violence to our

own bodies and to the natural rhythms, that when we're speeding, we can't touch into

that hearingness that really has everything to do with listening or being there for another

person, and it really has everything to do with listening to our own hearts, staying

resonant with what matters in our own heart. So, when we're stressed, we are physically

and mentally designed to speed up, and we have, you know, the built-in mechanisms of

fight-flight freeze, every one of us has that, and mentally we get busy trying to figure

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