Greetings.

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

To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. I'd like to 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 that 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 to 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, to areas of 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 of being the worm eating grape leaves.

I mean that's just part of evolution too.

And I don't know how many of you either had the hungry caterpillar read to you or read it to your children or reading it to your grandchildren.

How many? Hungry caterpillar. So that's like a good 90% of us, which is a story of a hungry caterpillar that each day is eating more and more food and the food's beautiful.

Like all these different kinds of fruits

...