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Greetings and welcome.

Let's start with a poem from the poet Rumi.

This is how a human being can change.

There's a worm addicted to eating grape leaves.

Suddenly he wakes up, call it grace, whatever, something wakes him,

and he's no longer a worm. He's the entire vineyard and the orchard too,

the fruit, the trunks, the growing wisdom and joy that doesn't need to devour.

This is how a human being can change.

This is a verse or poem about really the evolution of consciousness

and this shifting from a separate self that out of fear and grasping

is kind of addicted, habitual, and to that realization of connection and oneness

it allows us to really live from a place of love and wisdom.

What I'd like to do during this class is first ask you the question really,

what is between me and that sense of that wholeness, that growing wisdom and joy,

just a sense what is between me and that experience?

And then to really look at two areas that many of us land on that seem to run interference,

two areas of a fear where we might say we're stuck as that worm that's kind of addicted

to the grape leaves. And then just to explore how meditation can be this evolutionary strategy

that allows for grace, that allows us to wake up.

And to begin with just to say it's totally natural that we go through a phase

...