Let's start with a story I want to share with you, a friend of mine told me about this.

He was teaching an introduction to meditation class for seven to eleven year olds at a

monastery school and as one of the practices he took a gong and he said, I'm going to call

out the gong, play the gong and I just want you to listen to the sound and listen to

where it goes. Listen to the sound and listen to where it goes with interest. Just watch

where it goes. It says, if you follow and watch, you might get closer to God. Let's

what he told them. So the child, they did that and one of the children went home and

told his mom about the experience his mom knows my friend. So she relayed what happened

and the child said this. He said, well, when I watched and listened to where sound went,

different kind of sounds, not quite like a gong is it? When I listened and watched where

the sound went, I didn't get closer to God. I was God. Yeah, on the mouth of the young

ones. So there's this inquiry of what happens when we become fully present and it may be,

the Buddhists don't use the language of God as much that when we really watch and listen,

we're really fully here. We become what we are. We rest in the wholeness of awareness,

of spirit, of heart, whatever you want to call it. We embody the truth of what we are through

that full presence. And the challenge, as we know, and this is for every one of us and it's our

evolutionary conditioning and it helps to frame it that way. It makes it really not personal,

it's just how it is. Our attention gets hijacked all the time. So even when we come to sit down to

meditate almost more than ever, it's not our fault. The mind just goes all over. And sometimes

it's meandering and the times when we're suffering, it's a more charged reactivity.

You know, if you just say, okay, I'm going to sit quietly for the next five minutes and pay

attention to sensation. Deep Dharma is revealed. We find that when there's pleasantness, something in

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