Greetings.

We offer these podcasts freely and your support really matters.

To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com.

One of the most powerful and direct inquiries that can help us wake up right through our daily

life is in any given moment, just to pause and say, what is between me and presence right

now?

Or what is between me and really feeling at home and my body, my heart, with my world?

Just to ask that question is a way of immediately deepening attention.

What we usually find out when we ask that question, what is between me and presence, is that

there's these layers of anxiety, our layers of distractedness, that there's usually some

story about how we're doing or what's expected of us or what we need to do and how things

are going in our life.

Only it has, there's aspects of how, who I am in relationship to other people.

So there's all these layers.

Friend of mine was visiting this last weekend and we were talking about this, this kind

of inquiry and how we go into this trance and we don't realize we're not present for long

stretches and all of a sudden we'll go, oh wait a minute, where have I been?

So he was describing an experience he had had a few months ago that I wanted to share

with you and this friend of mine is an American Sikh so he wears the turban and he's got a very

full long gray beard and he's used to people staring and being confused and especially

in the last decade he's used to hostility.

He was in a rural conservative area and he was going into a food line and to one of the,

...