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

To make a donation, please visit tarbrock.com.

Number stay. As some of you know, I took much of the month of January off and I began with a

self-re-treat at home and then went up to the Forest Refuge in Massachusetts where I did a more

kind of formal silent retreat which is just lovely a chance to slow down enough to really

take in the moments and feel some real stillness and silence. And I missed the blizzard down in

Washington. Anyway, I came back to a lot a lot of emails as I do and one of them said,

atara, may your medication bring you peace happiness and bliss. Another friend,

your new I was coming back when I come back after I've missed a bunch of weeks. It's pretty intense.

New I was coming back in the swirl of our culture sent me a little story about a guy who had

returned from a nine-day, vipassana retreat and went back to his job at the zoo and seeing out how

chilly he was, you know, the headkeeper put him in charge of the tortoises. So this guy,

Dave, he walked slowly over to the cages and lunchtime the headkeeper checks in on him only to

see the cage door wide open and the tortoises are all gone. So he runs up and he said, what happened

with the tortoises? And Dave said, well, he says, we're talking real slowly. I opened the tortoise

cage door and it was like, whoosh, you know. So it can feel like that after in slow-mo. This

culture is on hyperdrive. So I wanted to share one of the kind of central inquiry that I find

is with me a lot and a particularly alive on retreat, which is really in any moment what is the

way of paying attention that is going to be most liberating? I mean, what really

frees our hearts and minds right now in this moment? And when I say liberating, what I mean is

that really wakes us up out of that dream or trance of being a separate limited cell.

What really wakes us up and allows us to realize the awareness and loving that's really in

...