Well, I'm delighted to be back with you. It always feels like a long stretch whenever

it's two weeks away. And I hope you've been staying cool and making it through this

weather. It's been pretty amazing. So I was out in California for those two weeks at a retreat,

which was quite wonderful for me. I hadn't, I've been writing and quite busy teaching,

so I hadn't had a chance to take the time. And I recommend going to retreats. It's amazing to

step out of our routines and dive in. So it was a lot of silence and quietness and

sitting meditation and also Qi Gong. I don't know how many of you are familiar with Qi Gong,

but that was a very at the center of the weave of this retreat. And Qi Gong is a form of meditation

that connects us with the basic aliveness consciousness that really is a source of creation,

gives rise to the whole living world. And I'm very synergistic with the practice we do here,

developing this refined attention to the aliveness inside and around us.

And one of the shared understandings of this retreat and our vipassana, our Buddhist retreats

is that when you tap into this dynamic awareness, because awareness is dynamic, it gives rise to life.

You really tap into the natural and universal intelligence in this universe

that makes possible every type of healing, every type of healing. You tap into this universal wisdom

and love that makes it possible to release blocks in your body that cause disease states,

that open the heart, and that really free the mind. And it's very visceral. When you,

especially you can tell when you've come out of a retreat, and this you might feel some

after a sitting meditation or any time that you're paying attention, there's more aliveness.

You see things as if for the first time there's a freshness to perception, there's a refinement

to inner listening, the senses are awake, that's one level. And you can sense when you

come out of deep attention that the heart's more free. It's described as the pure heart's release.

...