so welcome here wishing each of you a happy new year it's a wonderful thing to

be back with you again I missed being here at the end of the year and so I

want to greet you and I know that for many new years is a time of aspiration of

sensing how am I going to really enter this next part of my life and how many of

you committed to Wednesday night class? Can I see my hands? A few. All right how many

of you committed in some way to being kinder towards yourselves? Can I see

my hands? Yeah that's a big one. How many to being less judgmental in general?

Yeah a lot of us. Let's see what how many committed to in some way

simplifying your life a little slowing down? How many committed to speeding up

getting more down? Yeah so sometimes it comes sometimes our aspiration you know

is very deep and broad sometimes it's very specific you know start

exercising or dieting or reorganize the office you know clean the

gerbil cage more frequently whatever it is in the Buddhist traditions what's

called the Bodhisattva path which is the path of the awakening being in some way

the aspiration has to do with living more from love and from awareness and

there's so many different ways and so tonight I want to speak a bit one of

my one of the ways I think about the spiritual path that helps me is simply

as forgetting and remembering that we daily we forget we go into some sort of

a trance where we're caught in our thoughts and often they're fear driven

thoughts and judgmental thoughts our thoughts like we don't have enough time

and we're kind of racing to get things done and so daily we get into this kind of

a trance and we get preoccupied and we also remember sometimes for spot

...