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 in my body, my heart, with my world. Just to ask that

question is a way of immediately deepening attention and 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. And generally it has

there's aspects of 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? And so he was described in 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 lion into one of the just it just

been put up so it was kind of a new store and he was in line and he describes being in line and

standing there in a person in front of him was taking a long time the person behind him was

a kind of young guy who's bald who's covered with tattoos and so on. The clerk was she looked

like some local woman that had probably been there for her whole life seemed to know everybody

and he started feeling really uncomfortable like he didn't belong and like others were

considering him in a weird way and he just started feeling really restless and wanting to get out

of there and that was his experience and and he could feel the tightness and the constriction.

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