I'd like to begin tonight with one of my favorite teaching stories, one that's kind

of imprinted itself some, and it's a very, it's a lovely Hasidic story about a rabbi

Azusa, and he's on his deathbed and his disciples surrounded him, and he's weeping, and they're

trying to figure out why he's so upset, they're all perplexed, and so they asked him why

he's weeping, and one of them ventured to said, surely, if anyone is assured a place in

the kingdom of heaven, it's you, and the sage turned his head to his beloved students,

and said softly this, he said, if my children, when I stand before the heavenly court, I'm

asked Azusa, why are you not Moses? I shall have no hesitation in firming, I was not

born, I'm Azusa. If they ask me why then are you not in Elijah, I'll speak with confidence,

neither am I in Elijah. I weep friends because there's only one question I fear to be asked,

why were you not Azusa? So there's power to this teaching, and it's something that we can

each intuit in our own lives, that we in some way leave home, we in some way disconnect

from some natural beingness, from what is unique within us, from our full aliveness, and

we end up confining ourselves to a smaller sense of what we are. And in a way you can think

of it that we incarnate and very quickly between our culture and our caregivers, we're given

messages about who we are and really who we need to be, to be accepted and loved and successful

in this world here. And then we internalize that. So rather than paying attention to what's

right here, our passions, our fears, our longings, our aliveness, our creativity, we're focused

on these standards that we think we need to meet all the time, how we should be thinking or

feeling or acting, and it takes us away from home. So the way of moving from our self-story,

the narrative that confines us, and usually that narrative has built into it a lot of messages

of how something's wrong with us. And we really need to be different. And with those messages,

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