I wonder if the new term will start sometime this month. Hopefully seeing old and new faces. 🙏📿🧎🍁🍂

Just returned from a lovely cruise vacation, during which I enjoyed several meditations using Alistair’s recordings. As I wrapped one session on my stateroom balcony, I found myself immersed in a kind of metaphor for “the big open,” FWIW … I was the cruise ship — an intricate structure of compartmentalized preferences, ideas, thoughts, and a hull loaded with the ballast of my own archived experiences — sailing the waterways of the world. In the evenings, the ship’s lights begin glowing, creating a halo on the sea around the waterline — the fifth field, illuminating all that stuff and providing perspective on it from without. But I also found myself far out in the sea — in the actual big open — watching the ship gliding by, flowing with the flow, doing its thing ... and I felt immeasurably happy seeing it chug along on its way. The USS or HMS Beingfulness? 😁

The book that I mentioned in this morning's session is "The Archeology of Mind" by Jak Panksepp and Lucy Biven. It's quite a tome but well worth looking at if you are interested in this subject matter. https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-archaeology-of-mind-neuroevolutionary-origins-of-human-emotions-jaak-panksepp/2594153?ean=9780393705317

Mind over matter: can meditation soothe my troubled insides? It's a short little article how monks have a healthy gut.

Lost in Translation: Eat My Tongue The Tibetan Phrase “Che La Sa” A key point missing: In Tibetan culture, it is common to see old grandparents not only give a kiss to small children, but to also give a small candy or piece of food to children from their mouths – directly from mouth to mouth. This may not be the norm of your culture, but this is commonly done. After the Elder gives a kiss and a candy, since there is nothing left in their mouth, nothing left to give, they will say the phrase, “OK now eat my tongue,” (not suck, his Holiness misspoke due to his less than proficient English). The Tibetan phrase is, “Che la sa,” They say that as in, “I've given you all my love and the candy so that's it – all that's left to do is, “eat my tongue.” It is a playful thing that the children know. This is not really done in the Lhasa region the capital of Tibet as much, but it is more common in the Amdo region where the Dalai Lama is from. However it is definitely a Tibetan custom. If we are honest with ourselves, we know that when we form an opinion on any topic, without considering many aspects of the context, in any given situation, we are choosing to keep a significant degree of ignorance in our reasoning. 💎🌹 On Perception On the whole, we naturally tend to trust our everyday perceptions; we assume their validity without it even occurring to us to question them. We naïvely believe that the way we perceive things is identical with the way things are. And so, because events and things, including the self, appear to have objective reality, we conclude, tacitly and often without any reflection at all, that they do in fact have an objective reality. Only through the process of careful analysis can we see that this is not so, that our perceptions do not accurately reflect objective reality. The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso from the book "Essence of the Heart Sutra" Post Credit- Michael Gregory🙏🏻 From a friend in Ladakh.

As we move into the Second Being on our Monday sessions, we were talking about the anchor...

For reasons unknown. Perhaps simplicity. Wix is phasing out this Forum space and - as you may have noticed - we're moving these messages over to the Group pages. So, please, start posting in Groups instead of this Forum, as it will be eased out of existence at the end of the month.