Dealing With Stress In Times Of Uncertainty

This 38-minute dharma talk guides listeners into the Buddhist canon as it applies to dealing with stress in our modern times. It is suitable for all, regardless of the listener's experience with meditation or Buddhism.

Transcript

So,

Friends,

This evening I'd like to do a talk on dealing with stress during times of uncertainty.

We probably,

For most of us,

Have some of the most uncertain times,

Perhaps in our whole lives in terms of the world around us.

And it can feel very much like we're drowning,

The stories,

The world,

Everything is so big.

The challenges,

Both real and imaginary,

Are huge.

And so really there's this sea of external stressors that are visiting us on a regular basis.

Each day seems to bring something new.

Thank God for our meditation practice.

It's such a wonderful gift that we have,

Just this capacity that we have to be present,

To learn how to be open to ourselves,

Our minds,

Our thoughts,

Our feelings,

The world around us.

And what a gift it is for you and I to be able to have that.

It's such a wonderful tool and so many people in the world don't have that.

So as these external stressors come at us,

We feel less in control of things.

We have this false sense of control that we are in charge of things in our lives.

And things like this let us know,

No,

You're not really in charge.

The world,

The universe is in charge and you're playing a part in it.

So it's helpful for us to see that we're not in the control that we thought we were in.

We're not really in charge of this thing.

So as we begin to look at these stresses in our lives,

There's some hallmarks of it that we can begin to investigate from our practice of introspection.

The first is we feel less spacious.

So if you just think for a minute when you're at peace and all is well,

Isn't there a kind of a spaciousness and openness both in time and in space?

So in terms of time,

There's a bigness,

A vastness to us.

In terms of the time,

It's not just a compression here.

We have this bigger view of how,

Although we're in the moment,

We have this bigger view of time stretching out around us.

So when there's stress,

We have less of that.

We have less of that sense of space and time.

And there's a kind of immediacy that comes to the present moment.

And it's ironic because when we're doing a meditation practice,

We talk about becoming aware of the present moment.

And yet during times of high stress,

We're very much in the present moment.

But it's a very different kind of being in the moment.

Stress is a practice of being attentive in a particular kind of way,

The kind of way where we do not have judgments.

We don't have a running commentary.

We're not making decisions about this moment.

We're just experiencing the moment.

It's very different than the immediacy of a stress-induced awareness or a stress-induced immediacy where we're constricted in the moment.

We're consumed by the story.

We're consumed by the commentary of the mind.

We're consumed by judgment,

Consumed by planning and decision making.

So it's a very different feeling,

Although we use the same words of the present moment to express both.

Another hallmark is things become very black and white.

We lose our ability to process ambiguity the more stress we have.

So we find ourselves as the world constricts,

There's that and this out there and in here.

And the boundary between those two,

Which is really the space of ambiguity,

Isn't it?

That space begins to fall away.

And there's this division between black and white,

Between out there and in here,

So that we lose our ability to sort through things that are not in one camp or the other.

And as we become more black and white,

We become more rigid in how we look at things.

So our thoughts,

Our feelings,

Our perspectives,

Our judgments,

They seem to take on a life.

They seem to become more powerful in and of their own right.

And as that happens,

Our whole perspective seems to shift.

It's not just for our thoughts,

It's how we think of the world.

It's how we think of others,

How we relate to others.

So if you reflect when you're under stress,

When you're feeling stressed,

If you're in relationship,

What are the kinds of things that might come out?

We get angry,

We get frustrated,

We become fearful.

And as those become the roots of our intentionality,

Unskillful behaviors often follow from those.

We become more judgmental of ourselves and of others.

As our world becomes more of a duality,

Of a right and wrong,

A good and bad,

A this and that,

As it becomes more of that and we begin to.

.

.

And we move into that space,

We may be less judgmental about ourselves than we are normally.

As a judgmental-ness about ourselves,

It's often a place of ambiguity.

It's easier to see there's an enemy,

There's a bad guy,

There's a bad something out there,

And there's a victim.

And that space that gets created often will soften our judgment about ourself.

That's not really.

.

.

It sounds like a good thing as we're not judging,

But we're replacing that judgment space of ourselves with judgment about there.

So the wall begins to grow as we do more judgment out there,

As we become the victim of circumstances,

The victim that's helpless,

That has no control,

No ability to regulate or change things.

It's important to understand,

Especially when we start talking about world events,

Whether it's a political situation or the virus or other things that are in our lives,

When we talk about that judgmental quality,

It's important to really understand the difference between judgment and discernment.

Judgment is an emotional response to something.

It's a perspective on something,

But it's emotionally driven.

So when we're judging,

We're making an impression of what's out there,

But we're also doing it from a base of emotionality.

So it's from our greed or aversion that that is coming up.

We don't like it,

And so we judge it.

That's different than discernment,

Which is based in clear seeing.

Discernment may.

.

.

The outcome may look the same.

So if I see something shouldn't be happening,

It's not the best way for this to be.

If that's coming from my aversion to that,

That's a judgment,

And you can often feel the emotion when that's happening.

And contrast that with when you see clearly it's not supposed to be this way,

This is not the best way for it to be for myself and for others,

And then clearly see I can take action to change that.

So it's an important distinction as we look at these stressors.

Where is our decision process about what's going on in the world coming from?

Is it coming from judgment or is it coming from discernment?

I often hear people say when I talk about this stress reduction of finding ways to reduce our stress and seeing the story that the world is,

People say,

Well,

I need to be able to,

You know,

See what's out there.

I have to act in the world.

I have to do that.

And absolutely we do.

So it's not that we're not acting from the world,

It's where that action is coming from.

When that action is coming from judgment,

From aversion,

From greed,

Whatever happens to be there,

From confusion is the other one.

We just don't know what leads to what.

When it's coming from those places,

The kinds of outcomes that we are seeking generally won't come forth from those.

It's the way the Buddha talked about that our actions are rooted in our intentionality.

So if our intentionality is in greed and aversion,

The actions are not going to be skillful actions.

So as we become more judgmental,

The world becomes more black and white,

We begin to move to these polar extremes one way or the other,

And we begin to see the world more that way.

And small things can set you off.

I know for me,

Sometimes just seeing a sign in somebody's yard is enough to viscerally feel some reaction to something.

Just hearing something on the news about COVID and how people are responding to it,

I can viscerally feel something pop up in me as a judgment about the world,

And then moving towards polar positions.

And then we retreat oftentimes into our beliefs,

The way things should be,

And the feeling of being right about those things,

That these are qualities and values and ideas that are worth holding onto.

And I'm right for holding these,

And the other is wrong for their position.

That the polar opposites that arise,

And these beliefs become front and center in our minds,

And we take refuge in them.

And the beliefs begin to outweigh our experience.

We begin to take refuge more in the beliefs of the mind than we do in the actual experiences of the heart and the body.

So it's kind of a refuge,

I guess,

But not a very safe refuge.

It's a false refuge.

And yet that's where we often retreat to.

So we begin to fixate on these views,

These beliefs that we're holding,

To see them as rigidly right and the other as rigidly wrong.

And in the moment that we can become quite fixated on these beliefs,

They can become crystallized in our experience,

And when we crystallize on these beliefs,

On these ideas,

We lose our ability to live from those beliefs and values,

From those views.

We give that up to fixate on them so that they have a certain fixed position.

So the very idea of these beliefs and values and ideas that we hold about the world around us can then become our prison guards,

Our prisoners,

And we lose our ability to see clearly.

Part of the thing that happens with stress is when they come into our lives,

One of the key things there is the release of the stress hormones in the body.

As we look at what those are,

One of the big ones is cortisol.

We've talked about this in the group before.

But the idea of cortisol,

Cortisol is a hormone in the body,

And it's a very useful and necessary hormone.

One of its capabilities,

One of its capacities is to prepare us for action.

So part of what it does there is releases sugars into the body and gets the body ready to respond to physical action.

When we get stressed,

The body releases cortisol into our system.

And if it's a physical situation that we're responding to,

The body responds physically and appropriately to the cortisol release that's in the body.

The problem comes in when there isn't a physical situation that we need to respond to,

Such as an idea,

A stressor that's come into our life about the world around us or ourselves,

Where there's really no behavior or action that you're going to be taking about it.

And when that happens,

The body is not responding anymore.

It's just holding the cortisol.

And over time,

This cortisol buildup in the body has very negative effects physically in the body.

Mentally in the body,

It has a few that impact our ability to see clearly.

And one of those is we begin to live at a high level of cortisol as we induce more of it into the body through our thoughts and actions and behaviors that are from that place of stress.

The cortisol level in the body,

We find this new level,

And that's our normal.

So we're operating from this high level of cortisol.

And oftentimes,

It doesn't take much to set us off when we are living from that high cortisol level.

So this process is happening every time we're stressed.

And we have micro stressors is probably the way to think about it.

And you can see these clearly for yourself as you watch your experience.

It could be a thought.

It could be a sound,

Something you read or saw,

A conversation you're in.

This stress model,

If you look at it,

It's as if it happens before you're really even aware of it.

It's crawled up into your life,

And then suddenly,

We become aware of it.

And I call that a micro stressor because it has that impact on the body.

But it also has the potential if we don't feed it,

If we don't energize it,

To just go away.

The problem is when we're living under stress,

When we are in that mode of the black and white mode,

When we're in that mode,

When we're locked into our beliefs and our ideas,

When we're living in that moment,

Those micro stressors don't go away.

And they actually get energized and fed by where the mind is.

And again,

You can see this for yourself.

If you look at when you're feeling stress,

The thought or feeling,

Physical feeling,

Whatever it is that induced that stress tends to have more of those.

It tends to induce more of those kinds of thoughts.

Because you can actually watch a stream of thoughts appearing where they're feeding off of each other.

The next one,

The first one comes,

The second one comes from that,

The third from that.

And through this continuation of the story,

We're continuing to induce stress and create this world of duality,

Of a right,

A wrong,

A good,

A bad,

A black or white,

And positioning ourselves in it.

And to see for ourselves how when we do that,

We're shutting out so much of what our experience and awareness have to offer us.

And so these micro stressors then as we have more of these in our lives,

They aggregate.

And we will build what we think of as stress in everyday life,

These long experiences of feeling very uncomfortable,

Maybe feeling weak or bounded,

Sick maybe.

There's a lot of different things that go into the outcome of this and how we might live from it.

So what we really need to be doing is first of all identifying and seeing that this is true.

And that's really to look to see how does stress materialize in you?

How do the thoughts,

The feelings,

The emotions,

The physical sensations,

How do they interact with you?

This is really where we can call in our practice of mindfulness,

Of meditation,

The tools we learn in meditation.

I think really one of the easiest and simplest places to start is the process of breathing,

Just taking a breath,

Just stopping for a moment and in that stopping,

Just taking breath.

When we do that and deliberately breathe,

In that moment we're doing a couple of things.

The first thing is we're directing our attention to that breath.

It's not a big thing where you got to sit on a cushion or anything else,

It's just stopping,

Taking a breath and being aware of that breath.

So when we've done that,

You've actually redirected your awareness away from this fixed view,

Away from this right and wrong,

Good and evil,

Away from that space into freedom,

Into a place of peace.

And you can look at that for yourself,

Try it,

Just take a breath or two and pay attention just to that breath or two and see what that's like.

A very useful tool when you're working this way is introspection after you've done the breath to look back and see,

To compare and contrast what these two states are like.

So you're stressful,

You realize,

This is crazy,

I'm going crazy here,

I'm going to take a breath and you stop,

Breathe in,

Breathe out,

Breathe in,

Breathe out.

And then the next moment you reflect,

What was the difference between those two states for me?

The one where I was agitated,

My mind was on fire and the next one,

Breathe in,

Breathe out,

Attentive,

Calm and peaceful.

As soon as you stop that breath,

The rest of the stuff might come filling the hole again,

Might just come right back into it.

But in that moment,

There was peace.

It's very important to see this for yourself.

It's very important to see what that means.

What does it feel like to be at peace?

And that's the second valuable practice or valuable aspect of this practice of just taking a breath is to see what does it really mean to be present in the kind of present that we're talking about,

Not the immediacy of a stressful presence,

But in the kind of presence of the kind of awareness where in that moment,

For that one breath,

For that half breath,

For that in-breath only,

I'm not judging.

There's no story,

No commentary of my mind.

I'm not making any decisions about anything.

I'm just present to the breath.

And what does that feel like?

So as we do this,

We take this breath and it does two things.

The first thing it does is it stops the flow of stressors.

That's a very powerful thing,

That capacity that our mindfulness has to break the chain of stress propagation.

That ability is present and available to us in every moment.

It's always ours.

It's just our desire and capacity to take it.

That's all that's needed.

And the second thing is the more times we do that,

The more we begin to understand viscerally what it means to be present.

What does that mean?

Not up here,

Not what do we think it means to be present,

But what is the actual experience of being present?

Where does it manifest in the body?

How do I feel it in the body?

What happens to the mind when there's no commentary,

When there's no judgment,

When there's no firing of these concepts and thoughts and beliefs in our mind?

What is the state?

So it becomes more familiar to us to be present that way.

We understand more viscerally what presence is.

As we become more familiar with presence,

What it means,

It becomes easier to go there.

So when we first start working with this,

Trying to get to that place when there's a lot of stress can be challenging.

Instead of two breaths,

It might take five.

You might have to go get a drink of water and come back and do another two breaths.

So because we don't know what it is,

We're trying to find our footing,

If you will,

Mentally in this space that we call our mind.

But when you've practiced this for a while,

And most of you,

I think,

Know this,

When you've practiced this for a while,

It's like coming home.

That one breath,

Just the in breath and alone is like,

Ah,

Yes,

I'm home.

So this is a very powerful tool for us to be able to use just a breath like this.

It's not that the breath is going to make everything okay.

That's not what we're saying.

It's not what happens.

All that needs to be okay in that moment is here.

This is okay.

And when this is okay,

It gives us the capacity to meet the world in other ways.

So training ourselves this way,

Even if it's only a breath at a time,

Is a very useful tool.

The second thing we can do is the practice of meditation in whatever form you happen to be able to do it at the time.

A very useful tool is to move into the body,

Awareness of the body.

In the Buddha's Foundations of Mindfulness,

This was not only was it the first foundation of mindfulness,

But in the Suttas,

The Satipatthana Sutta,

Which is the foundation of mindfulness teachings of the Buddha,

He spent about half of that sutta just talking about being mindful of the body.

Why is this?

Why would we spend so much time there when this mental capacity and everything that's up there is so big?

Well,

There's a couple of reasons.

The first is because it's much more accessible.

And if you think about this,

The body does not fight back when we try to be aware of it.

It may hurt,

It may be in pain,

But it doesn't fight our paying attention to it.

It doesn't do that.

It has no resistance to our paying attention to it.

So it's a doorway into being mindful.

Compare that to the mind,

Especially when the mind's on fire with aversion,

With anger,

With fear.

And we've all been through this where I try to be mindful and I'm angry.

My gosh,

What a battle.

The mind is so full,

There's no room for mindfulness.

It's as if mindfulness is slapped around by the anger.

So it's a much harder place to join our capacity to be present to our experience.

So with the body,

That's the first thing is it's not going to resist you paying attention to it.

So we can then,

Through the body,

We can begin to play around with what does it mean to be present to the body,

Just as we did with that one breath.

What does this mean now to be present to the body?

Well,

Like we did with the breath,

It's directing our awareness to something in the body.

It might be some sensation that's calling you.

You might look for where do I hold my stress in the body?

As soon as you've asked the question,

Drop the question and look.

Don't get caught up in the question.

Well,

I think I hold it in here.

You don't need any words.

Just look.

What's going on in this body?

What do I experience in this body?

And the body will let you know.

You have this light that you can shine through the body and different parts of the body will tell you,

Pay attention here.

Pay attention here.

It won't push you away.

It won't try to deflect your awareness.

It won't try to deflect what you're looking at.

It'll allow you to look freely.

So we can investigate the landscape of this physical body and find these places that we are constricting and tightening and how we're building into our physical experience that which has come through the mind,

Through the stressors of the mind.

It's a very useful tool that way.

The good thing is as we do this with the body,

The mind will begin to quiet down just as it did when we took the one breath.

When you're paying attention to the body,

The mind begins to calm down.

It might take a while,

But it will do it.

Some of the things that are very helpful that we've talked about before,

One of them is curiosity.

Can you be curious about the sensations in the body?

Really curious about them.

It's hard to manufacture curiosity,

But if you're looking and wondering,

Curiosity seems to arise.

And you can do things like,

You know,

Just even something as simple as,

Can I feel one of my internal organs?

Can I be aware of my heart beating?

Can I feel my heart beating?

Can I be aware of my belly,

The sensation in my belly?

In my hands,

What do my hands feel like?

Ask the question,

Then drop the words and go into the experience.

When you do this,

You can come out and again,

Introspection is a very valuable tool here.

Look to see what's the difference of dropping into the experience of your hands,

Just as we talked about,

Where you ask the question,

You know,

What's this experience of my hands?

Drop the question and go into the experience.

And contrast that when you are caught up to the extent that you lock onto your beliefs and crystallize around them.

What's the difference between the experience of hand,

Letting it all go,

Letting the stories go and the belief that I am right in my views,

The rigidity of me being right and the fountain of thoughts and feelings that are generated by that experience.

There's no room for my openness.

There's no room for paying attention.

We're barraged by the words,

By the stories that gush forth in that case.

So again,

It's very useful through introspection to see what's the difference between my experience and locking into a belief.

We are developing our meditation practice when we do this.

We're developing our capacity to be present.

During the check-in,

Somebody mentioned that met loving kindness is a practice around awareness.

It's true.

These are all practices around awareness when we allow ourselves to pay attention to them.

So that's really the essence of what we're doing as we look at the body here.

We're paying attention,

Seeing what it's sharing,

What it has to say.

And at the very same time,

We're training ourselves to become familiar with that so that at future moments,

We don't have to go through as much work to be present to the body because we just will be present to the body as we begin to know what it means to be present to the body.

So it's a wonderful practice to have.

We can continue this depending upon how caught up you are and how stressed you are,

Continuing with the body for as long as you need to with the breath and the different sensations in the body,

With body scans,

With things like that.

So you soften and quiet everything down.

If you get to the point where you are quiet and the body is at peace and the mind begins to quiet like that,

You can then move into awareness of the mind,

Of the thoughts.

We have to treat that gently.

That's moving into the other foundations of mindfulness that the Buddha talked about,

To be careful with those.

Unless we're still and quiet,

They can develop their life again and come back as a story.

So it's important that if we do move into those,

We don't feed the story,

But rather look at what's going on.

So we can see as we're paying attention just to the experiences,

Whatever we're aware of,

That thoughts will arise.

If we don't energize them,

They will just go away.

They just come and they'll go away.

Emotional responses are the same way.

They'll arise and they'll go away.

Feeling tone,

Pleasant or unpleasant,

Arises and goes away.

It's really informative to see that the only time it's any more than that is when we engage it and get caught up in it and build it a life of its own,

That life through our stories.

So there's nothing inherent in them to have a story.

It's what we do with them.

So this tool then of mindfulness,

Living it this way,

Not only will it reduce stress,

But it gives us the tools to be able to meet stress as it comes to us in our daily lives.

We don't have to wait until we're meditating to be able to live from this moment if we know viscerally what it means to be present.

And then the other tool we have is loving kindness or metapractice.

And this can be useful in many different ways.

But a couple of the ways that it's particularly useful is the first one is when all the things I just talked about aren't happening for you.

So you try to pay attention to breath and it doesn't work.

You're still caught up.

You can feel the agitation in your body.

You look at your body and it's too agitated.

Your mind is too active to be able to really be curious about your body.

You're trying to survive mentally,

Not trying to open up.

You're just trying to survive at that moment.

So the tool of mindfulness,

One of its qualities,

If you pay attention to it,

It's like we're concentrating the awareness.

When you're really agitated,

That can be hard,

Not only hard to do,

But it can be almost counterproductive because we'll get more agitated as we try to narrow down it.

So using a practice like Metta is a very wonderful tool to be able to meet that space.

Loving kindness or Metta ultimately means connection.

What it ultimately means is we're accepting things or opening to things just as they are.

We're taking down the barriers between what we call ourselves and what we call the world.

We're seeing more clearly that the barrier that we feel and interpose between ourselves and the world is of our own making,

Not in a judgmental way that there's something that we shouldn't have done or anything like that,

But that this very nature of being human,

Of having these aggregates,

Being these five aggregates,

That very nature causes us to meet the world that way.

And loving kindness,

As a practice like that,

We can allow whatever we're experiencing in a moment to just say,

This is what's here,

This is what's true,

I open to you.

My mind is agitated,

My body is agitated.

I hate the situation in the world.

I hate the neighbors.

I hate you.

I hate myself.

I hate it up.

That's okay.

That's just a feeling.

That's okay.

I'll open to you.

I'll let you be here.

And in that process of opening to it,

You can actually begin to feel around that fireball of anger and hatred,

You can actually begin to feel a space moving up,

Moving with the anger to be able to be in there.

So play with it.

You have another opportunity then to become curious.

Oh my gosh,

Look at that,

There's a little space around my anger.

I'm angry.

I hate it,

But I'm still curious a little bit here.

What's that like?

So you get to look at that as well.

And then as we begin to open to ourselves,

There's a kind of soothing that happens,

A natural soothing that happens out of that.

It's as if we're calming the waves.

It's as if we're taking this loving kindness practice,

The phrases,

Or even just the awareness of softening,

Just the awareness of opening.

However you want to practice it,

It's like a salve on these wounds.

It's like putting aloe vera,

I guess it is,

Putting aloe vera on a sunburn.

The very act of it is a soothing process.

So you can even visualize this as you're doing your metta practice.

Just imagine your anger,

Your fear,

Your frustration as a kind of a sunburn,

Agitation that comes with something like that.

And that you're putting a salve on it.

May I be well.

May I be safe.

May I be happy and at peace.

However your phrases are,

This is your salve over this agitated mind and body,

This burned mind and body.

And in that moment to soften those things that way.

And then if we're able to,

We can move outward from ourselves as we begin to become peaceful and quiet.

We can begin to move outward.

And we do this gently.

We move out.

There are standard ways to do the metta phrases.

And those are great when all is well.

And you're just sitting down to do metta and do them in the order that they're recommended or often taught in.

But when you're doing this as a way of sort of straightening things out for yourself,

Do it in a way that works for you.

So if you can,

Do it for yourself first.

Get this house,

Get this mind,

This body at peace.

Get it clean.

Get it sorted out and softened the feelings.

Then you can begin to reach out.

You usually like to,

Excuse me,

To loved ones,

Family,

Friends,

Your pet.

So you're just reaching out and bringing that world a little bit closer as you're wishing well for these others.

Can you begin to see the lines between you and the others soften,

The boundary between you and the other soften?

If you do this,

You can now begin to move out further into the places that are uncomfortable and feel inherently dangerous to us,

The world,

Coronavirus,

The political situation,

Whatever it happens to be for you,

You can begin to move out there.

And as you're doing these phrases,

Even if you're not feeling them,

You can,

Like we did with the sunburn for ourselves,

You can begin to think of the metta that you're doing as a cleansing agent.

So just as you were soothing the sunburn for yourself,

This metta phrase is now we're a cleansing agent,

A soft rubbing,

Gentle rubbing of the world situation to take away this tarnish that your fixed views created with it so that you can begin to see the shine,

The luster,

The reflection of what's out there a little bit more clearly and a little bit less through the fixed view that your mind locked in around.

And just continue to let that feeling emanate from you.

And as you do it,

Not that you're going to embrace ideas or illnesses of the world or unskillful things,

It's not that we're trying to love those things.

And so we're trying to see that that's the situation.

This is what we are handed in this moment.

This is what the universe has offered in this moment right now.

It's these things.

And metta again is connecting.

It's saying this is what's true and because it's true,

I accept you.

We got to remember it sounds counter to taking action and it's not.

We're changing our relationship to the world.

What we're doing by accepting things this way is we're creating the capacity to meet the world from a different set of terms,

From skillful roots,

From clear seeing,

From generosity,

From compassion,

From an open heart to meet these ills of the world from that condition.

That's the essence of compassion,

Isn't it?

To meet the suffering of the world with an open and loving heart.

So what we're really doing is fostering compassion for the world around us this way.

And by doing this practice of metta to the extent that we're able to reach out into the world,

We're actually creating love in ourselves.

We're creating the capacity,

Not creating it,

We're clearing off our capacity to love.

It's our nature.

We're opening our nature,

Which is love,

To ourselves,

To this mind,

This body,

To those around us and to the extent that we're able to to the world.

So we can meet the ills of the world now through compassion instead of through aversion and anger.

And friends,

We need this and our world needs this.

When you do this for yourself,

You are doing it for the world.

When you are coming from love,

When you're meeting yourself in love,

You are meeting the world in love and it emanates out into the world around us.

So that's all I have for this evening.

So we'll sit for a few minutes and I'll leave a little bit of time for some discussion at the end.

Thank you.

Reviews

So helpful, especially the difference between judgement and discernment. Thank you.

You are a wonderful teacher. thank you 💖

Went more timely a year later. Thank you for this great talk.

Thanks, John. Namaste!