[176] Exploring Awareness, Relaxation, and Healing- with Jeffrey Stevens
3:53PM Oct 17, 2024
Speakers:
Jeffrey Stevens
Keywords:
meditation types
awareness meditation
bodhi awakening
preparatory practices
relaxation techniques
subtle body
mindfulness practice
feeling world
ordinary relaxation
meditative relaxation
atomic body
nowness
meditative stability
subtle body healing
awareness practice
All right. Good evening. Everybody ready to do a little bit of practice?
Good to see you all here, recognize quite a few of you. Last time, I guess it was then, then I don't remember what it was. It was earlier in this month i i told you about a topic that I'm going to be teaching a lot this year, and I said that I would be returning, which is tonight, to teach a little bit more about it. For those of you who weren't here, I'll just remind you of what that was, meditation, the idea the term meditation has just gotten to the point where it means so many things that it's not really clear that it means anything when you say it. Yet, we don't yet have more precise language that has enough of a user base to use so people often will talk about the type of meditation that they do, but it's often more in terms of a brand like they'll talk about what type of practice they're doing, which is just the name of the thing that whoever invented that is calling it, and that might be a fine practice, but it doesn't really promote any kind of clarity when they're talking to people who don't do what they do. So I don't really think that we're going to be finding new language soon, but I think that now is a good time for people, as they take an interest in meditation, to really start to understand what breaks meditation How to Break meditation down into its components. You may have done. I see this from time to time. People may have done a few years of meditation, and they don't actually know what type of meditation they're practicing. They also don't know that they could know what type of meditation they're practicing. But there really are types of meditation, and they do different things. Ultimately, the most exalted goal of meditation is what, in Sanskrit, is called Bodhi, or awakening. So you know, the Buddha was awakened through meditation and the teachings on meditation that awaken us come down through lineages like that, but there are many other things that we call meditation, and most of those have to do With the outer body, the inner body and the mind the outer body, the mind and the inner body, or so the channels and the winds are areas where meditative techniques can Come in to tame and clarify so that people can then go into the types of meditation that enlighten. But it should be known. And this isn't my take. This is just the tradition that I come from, which is pretty much the, you know, the tried and true meditation that uses the body, mind and subtle channels isn't for the purpose of becoming enlightened, it's for the purpose of preparing us for becoming enlightened or awakened. The meditation that leads to awakening has to do with awareness. Awareness is not the mind. It's not in the mind. It's not a part of the mind. It's a faculty that, on its own, is not, does not participate in karma. It can be obscured, but it can't be damaged. It also can't be improved. And so the way that we use awareness to awaken is we learn to recognize it. Recognition is the. Key to awareness meditation. So you'll hear a lot of if you go in that direction, you start learning from people who teach Mahamudra or Dzogchen or shikantaza or there are some Advaita Vedanta schools that talk about this. Many of them talk about it, but they don't actually have methods for it, because Advaita Vedanta is almost proud in not using methods. It simply triggers recognition through words, and that may work. For some people, it doesn't work. Probably for most people, it may stimulate interest, but at some point, if we decide that we want to experience this awakening, we have to determine how much preparation we are going to need, and we should engage in as much preparation as we need without going too far into that. It's sort of like if you're if you want to become a physician, and you have to go to law or law school, you have to go to medical school. You have to go to medical school, and then, I guess you pass your exams. I don't know. Probably there's some physicians here which can correct me. You would probably just want to do the minimum effective preparation to pass your exams, become a physician and then increase your knowledge base through the experience of being a physician, you wouldn't elect to take one or two or four more years before you even take the exams, because it's not really necessary to do that. If it were necessary, then that's what it would be. But what's happened in our world? Because we did not, and I think you all know this, we the English speaking people, the Indo, European speaking people, did not invent meditation. This doesn't come from our culture. This comes from a time in human culture that is so much older than any history we even have in our culture. It's pre Romans even, not only did we not understand it, but we didn't, I mean, not invent it, but we only partially received it when it was being offered for the first time in the mid 20th century. So it was quite a bit more profound and elaborate than anyone expected. Because when people went to India, for example, to meet with meditators, they they met people who appeared to be very simple, very simple people, not people living in libraries, not people that had a lot of the kind of paraphernalia of the intellectual life. And often they would get basic meditation instruction, and they might assume that that was it. So there was a lot of, what did George Bush say? Misunderestimated. We sort of misunderestimated how deep this stuff was. And of course, that's all been remedied in the past 50 or 60 years, 70 years, because people became more and more interested and they would make the journey. But it was a little too late, in some sense, for that to sway our popular notion of meditation, because the book started coming out, and the books were very simple, just chant Om, or just so many, so many things you're starting with, like Ram Dass and be here now. And this idea that enlightenment was just gonna happen, it was just, you know, it's really not that difficult. I mean, look at these people with no clothes on, wandering through India, just radiating this enlightenment. If they can do why can't we do it? And I don't know, but I guess we couldn't, because, you know, I can't really point to many people, if any, who did that, the people that I know, who do seem to have a level of accomplishment, did it in in a very strategic way. They did it in a very involved way. They were very careful. They're very knowledgeable, and they worked very, very hard at it. Many of them learned languages. They partially learned, even enough to translate. They would go into retreats one of my friends. Is went, went to Nepal to meet Toku urgent Rinpoche. He was a great Dzogchen master.
He got the fundamental instructions, and then went just down the hill from where Toku urgent was, and went into retreat for nine years, nine years. That's the kind of thing, which is not even surprising to the traditions that teach this someone who really wants to wake up. I'm not saying that everybody has to do nine years, or even one year, but that is not considered extreme. That's very understandable. Over the past few years, I've met a number of people who've done six years, nine years, that kind of thing, and in very simple situations, just doing very simple practices so that they can enter into awareness and wake up. Have they woken up. I don't know. I do know that they're very impressive people. They're very free people, they're very kind people, very inspiring people, and probably they're in a very good position to live out the rest of their lives. So much of the meditation that we get in our world that we hear about, much of the early access stuff, if we go to a retreat or we study with this person over here, most of what they're going to be teaching, with some exceptions, I should add, is preparatory stuff, anything at all, anything at all that involves visualization or mantra or working with the breath, or visualizing channels or following the breath, all of that, without exception, is preparatory. That is the stuff that you do to condition yourself so that you can more easily enter into awareness and wake up. But there are these other traditions that discourage that. I mean, they even traditions like Dzogchen and Mahamudra have so much of that preparatory stuff, the six yogas of Naropa and TUMO practice, all the visualization practices that you learn from Tibetans. But why do they have that? They have it just because they have it. They have it because for 1000 years or more, all of those methods have been passed down the pipeline, and lineage holders have this stuff. But if you really get to know a teacher and they really understand what it is that you want, they may discourage you from doing any of that, and they may tell you to plunge into awareness. Now, some of you probably have heard me tell that story myself, after 20 something years of doing all of the very complicated visualization practices and mantra practices and inner energy practices, stuff that I I'm glad I did it. I loved doing it. I started to work with a teacher who was a lineage holder in all of that stuff, and I asked for advice. And I thought for sure he was going to give me the super secret visualization stuff, or the inner channel stuff, not at all. He told me to stop all that stuff. He said, you've done plenty of that. You just need to rest in awareness now. Just rest in awareness. And I couldn't believe he was telling me that. I just couldn't believe it. It's like your your professor telling you, don't bother studying. Just come, just give it, take the exam from your heart. That's that's the best way to do it, but that really is what it was. And I think I've, I've shared this story before that took me, that took me many months to I struggled with that. I I just was so conditioned to think that these, all of these things that I was doing were essential. And he said, Those are great to do, but those aren't going to you're certainly not going to attain enlightenment through those. That's not what they're for. Don't you want to attain awakening? And so I've been thinking for many years, why do we all and I just mean like teachers, like me, my friends, the people who this is sort of what we were trained to do. This is what we do. Why do we all keep teaching this preparatory stuff? I mean, it's good. It's a very good thing to do, but it also seems a little bit like, shouldn't we be emphasizing the awareness stuff more? But what happens is that most of us, we kind of look to our teachers to determine, well, what should we do? Because we don't want to, we don't want to, like, abandon the lineage. We don't, you know, these lineages work. They produce enlightened people in every generation. We don't really have lineages in our culture that do. That. So we're sort of trusting these other lineages. And what I've noticed over the past four years is that the teachers I admired the most were beginning to do that. They were beginning to they hadn't quite made it clear that that's what they were doing. But last year and this year, I really got confirmation that, yeah, let's move in that direction. And I decided in conversation with quite a few other people that yeah, that's just what I'm going to do from now on. If somebody wants to learn the preparatory stuff, sure they I'll do that, probably on a case by case basis, because some people really do, but for the most part, we should really do what transforms us. And for the most part, we are in a situation where people are so amplified with anxiety and stress that the teachings on awareness become obvious. It's easier to practice them. It sounds almost impossible. It sounds hard to believe. It also sounds like maybe that's bad news, but when things get out of control, and fear and panic begin to take over. The teachings on awareness are much easier because the contrast is so much greater. So we started practicing awareness last week, and we're going to continue tonight, so we have a basic idea in awareness based practice, that all of our problems, all of our problems, come from tension. That's it, tension. Now in the preparatory teachings, that's not what we say. We say that all of our problems come from ignorance, and they do from that perspective, of course, but from an inner perspective, our biggest problem is ignorance. Where does ignorance come from? Well, it comes from a contraction that happens at the dawn of every moment. Some teachers will call this fear. They'll call it fear. But I think that just a neutral descriptive word is tension. We have a fundamental attention in sorry, we have a fundamental tension at the dawn of each moment, which causes identity, which isn't real, to position itself in opposition to what what is experienced. Then we have more and more layers of tension on top of that. And what tension does is it distorts the ability of awareness to see accurately. So if you just think, like, if I take my glasses here and I put them under great tension, somehow I heat them up and and I pull them, when I put them back on, probably there's going to be some distortion, and things aren't going to look quite right. Well, you could say that that's what's happening at various levels that are that our awareness is looking through, and those are the the layers of the mind and the subtle body, so we can approach those distortions either manually through trying to bend them back, try to reshape them the way they should be. That's what preparatory practices do. And actually, it sounds like that would be a crazy thing to do, but it's very effective. It just takes a very long time to do that. It works, but it takes years and hours a day for years. That's the reality of those practices, visualization and mantra and inner body work. That's, you know, that's not going to be something that you do in 20 minutes a day, four days a week. Or we can learn to relax. And that sounds so it sounds like, um, it's too easy, but it isn't necessarily that easy. It's simple,
but it takes a type of bravery that we don't have when we begin we really don't, even if we're very brave people. If we were brave in that way, we wouldn't be confused people. Our confusion is based on a contraction away from something, and as we move towards that, we have a hardwired flinching reaction to it, and most of us have just learned not even to notice that we immediately go into exit strategies and never even understand what happened there meditation, what is often called non meditation or just relaxing. Meditation helps us relax down to that fundamental flinch, that fundamental wince, where we go into conceptual mind without even knowing it. And it's very effective at bringing us through the layers of distortion down to the root. But it's also very effective at something else which never gets billed it's never described in the traditional sources, and that is that it heals us. This type of relaxation heals our wounds, our psychic wounds, our mental wounds, our emotional wounds, it heals us. You could say that tension is the problem and relaxation is the solution. The reason that relaxation is the solution is that relaxation is what liberates awareness to come forward. Awareness is actually the solution. But how do we get to awareness? Any of you who've done meditation on awareness know that one of the most just difficult things of it is you're always asking, Is this awareness? Am I in awareness right now, Teacher, I'm not sure I understand awareness. I mean, if I could, if, if I could list out the number of times I've heard that question, I'm not sure I understand awareness. Is this awareness? I don't really get what you mean by awareness, even for people who've been meditating for years. Well, there's a reason for that. The thing that's asking the question is the mind, and the mind cannot see awareness. It will never be able to see awareness. The mind can't recognize awareness. It doesn't have the faculties to see awareness, because awareness is not a thing. It's empty. It can be experienced, but not through the mind. It can be experienced but not as an object. It's a subject. It is the subject. We are that awareness, but we think that we're the mind, but we're only capable of thinking we're the mind when we're tense, as soon as we're tense, we're out of awareness, and we're in the realm of tension, which is the mind, and then we tense up about things, and that's another layer of tension, and things just get crazier and crazier, and then you have a world where, everywhere you go, people are confused and afraid and in competition with one another. And you know that it doesn't have to be that way, but it is that way, and that's because of tension. Tension is the fundamental problem in this perspective, so the first step of relaxation, you can either begin with ordinary relaxation, or you can begin with meditative relaxation. People who are absolutely new to meditation probably should start a little bit with ordinary relaxation. So what is ordinary relaxation? Well, you all know what it is. It's it's letting go of tension within the body. That's ordinary relaxation of the body, and then the mind just letting go of your fixations, your emotional fixations, just being with that's that's a little more than just ordinary relaxation, but you basically have to let go of stress and feel your body. The most important thing when you begin any type of awareness practice is that you can find the feeling world, the world that feels rather than thinks. Some of us can do that easily, but some of us really can't do that. It really. Really takes a bold leap for us. The thinking world looks like what we think, the feeling world is like, and so we stay in the thinking world, but the feeling world is actually where we need to be if we're going to relax any more deeply than that. So there are various ways of relaxing, but I think the best one that I've ever seen is taught by Sony Rinpoche, and he just calls it dropping. So in this sense, what we do is we just drop the thinking mind abruptly, and we spill it into the feeling world, the body we drop thinking and we feel we have to do this abruptly. Usually, relaxation wouldn't be abrupt. We wouldn't abruptly relax. That doesn't sound very relaxing. And most of the stages of relaxation that we can explore in meditation are not abrupt. They're very relaxed and warm and open, but at this first level, we have to be abrupt, because we have to take the conversation out of the mind's control. We make a decision. We don't have a conversation. We just drop. The mind doesn't get to say yes or no. If we're not abrupt, the mind will say, I will drop in a second. But first of all, let me get clear on this, and then we never drop. So we drop, we land in the body, and then we feel. We'll probably have five seconds, if we're good, five seconds of feeling before the mind begins to tense up again. So we have to find a strategy. There, we drop thinking and land in the body and feel in mindfulness based practice. This might be called placement. We've placed our attention on the body, and now we're mindful of that. We stay on the body through exerting the effort of mindfulness, that's mind based practice. Certainly it works, but this isn't mind based practice. We are not going to use mindfulness to stay in the feeling world. If we did, we wouldn't be practicing awareness practice. We'd be practicing mindfulness. So what do we do? Well, it's always going to be the same thing. We relax again. We drop thinking, land in the body and feel and then when we become aware of thought, we relax again. And thought almost lifts us out of the feeling world, but we relax again and we come back down, just like water. It's hard to pick up water. We make it so that the mind can't pick us up. We're just relaxed. So we stabilize in the feeling world by continuing to relax. And the skill here. The first skill is being abrupt. Just drop thinking and land in the body. That's skill number one. Skill number two is becoming sensitive to the arising of thought. And rather than trying to prevent the arising of thought, which is never going to work, we try to become aware of the rising of thought, and we use it as a signal to relax, and we can overpower the habitual tendency of discursive thinking by just These two steps. So let's work with that there are ways of learning to drop thinking like one of them. You've probably seen this, or maybe you've done this. Maybe you've done it with me, maybe you've done it with Sonia Rinpoche. Is that you raise your hands up and you just go and at that moment of impact, you just let go of everything and you stay in the body. Another way is that you just do it. You just drop thinking, and come into the body
that presupposes that you know what the body is, that you know what feeling is. So if you do, if you're someone who has some relationship with the feeling world of the body, then you don't have to do this. But if you don't, if you're like, I'm not really so sure, then just ah. Ah, that abruptness, that suddenness, that explosiveness, will shatter, scatter your thoughts. And when your thoughts scatter, you land in the body. Where else are you going to land? You've just scattered the thing that has always tried to get between you and the body when you've gone to relax thought has caught you and then carried you away your entire life. So we're just learning how to disrupt that, and we end up feeling so let's just for a minute, just drop thinking and land In feeling. Feeling is the World of the body. Ah,
once You are touching the feeling realm, you can now snuggle into it a little bit by continuing to relax. It's kind of like my cat. My cat is not supposed to go outside ever. But anytime the screen door is open, he'll very slowly go up to the screen door and just sit there. He won't go out at first, and then when I'm not paying attention, he'll very slowly go out, and I'll see him, and I'll come up to him say, get back in. And he just very slowly keeps going. Just keeps going until he can get under, like a lawn chair. He doesn't speed up, he doesn't run. He just slowly creeps until I can't get him. That's what we want to do. Thought is saying, Hey, come here and we just keep relaxing. Keep relaxing. Thought is used to us following its encouragement to come back into thinking. We don't want to fight thought. We just want to slowly keep relaxing. Keep Relaxing and go out of the tree each
once you feel the body and the Feeling world, all you need to do is to maintain relaxation, keep your posture. That's important. Your spine should be as upright as you can get it without it being stiff. Your eyes are open in awareness practice, they really need to be and
and bit by bit, you see the attempt of the mind to bring you back into thinking, and you see how simple it is to simply relax. Instead, you don't have to say anything to the mind. You just relax. And the mind can't withstand that. It, you enter into the feeling world again for a stretch of a few seconds, and when the mind comes back, you do it again. You don't expect that the mind is going to stop. It's going to continue to come after you, but it won't hurt you, and there doesn't need to be a fight, just a persistence. I'm just going to relax. Thank you.
Awareness, practice does not ask permission of the mind, and this can be uncomfortable at first. The mind is uncomfortable with that the mind is not used to, that the mind gets its way. But in awareness practice, we go beyond the authority of the mind, and we just can be very peaceful. We don't have to be antagonistic or rebellious. We can just relax. We
now in awareness traditions, they will tell you, when you are relaxed and awake and aware, you will always have objects of perception. So if you relax beyond anything, in some kind of
Samadhi that has no appearances, that is an obstacle in awareness practice that's a lower state. Awareness always has appearances, and we're learning how to be okay with whatever appears. Maybe the only appearance is just the sense of self, knowingness. That's possible. Maybe there's a little bit of thought in the background. Probably there is a room because our eyes are open, there might be sound or smell. We always feel the body, but we want to make sure that we're not trying to get away from appearances that is a sidetrack, not a good one. So please relax, but don't go anywhere. Just be here with whatever appears, probably it's just The computer and the chair And the refrigerator humming and
when we get used to this, and this is the first and some of the second stage of awareness, or layer of awareness, there is something to see and adjust to, and as we adjust to it, we relax even more, we have more confidence, and it allows us to go. Deeply into the next layer of awareness. So what we see is that things are arising and dissolving instantaneously. The body is now. It doesn't exist in the past or the future or even the present. It's this timeless now. It's spontaneously appearing and dissolving
that spontaneous feeling of the body, which we could call nowness, that's a good one, is actually very stable. It moves, of course, because the whole world is arising and dissolving, but it's very welcoming. We can move into it. There's nothing to be afraid of. It's not like a tiny little helicopter pad that we have to hit. We just relax and we're in it, and we can relax right into that dissolving ness of everything. I call this the atomic body, the body of impermanence, the body of nowness. Relax. Relaxing into this is the beginning of meditative stability within awareness. No mindfulness needed, no effort you
when we relax, we open so that anything that is trying to express itself can This is described as not blocking. We don't block the mind. We don't block the senses. We rest in nowness and let everything arise, but it doesn't distract us because we're relaxed.
When you're relaxed in the atomic body, the mind is not able to give you directions, any more than if I stand over a pool and point my finger, the water doesn't just start going in that direction. Water doesn't listen to me, and the mind doesn't listen I'm sorry. The atomic body doesn't listen to the mind. Awareness doesn't listen to the mind either. I
so by relaxing, we are mingling the atomic body, the body of nowness, with awareness and
gradually, by doing this again and again, we become used to it and we become stay. Able, and we are able to rest for longer and longer, and although our resting may not be seamless or continuous, it still may be disrupted, but we always come back and we just keep our relaxation, and we begin to notice that thoughts arise and dissolve just like the body does, and we begin to notice that they're not just similar, that The mind and thoughts arise kind of like the body arises and dissolves. They're the same. They're the same in the way that they appear and disappear. And we begin to see that body and mind so very different in their expressions are not different in the way they appear and dissolve. This is called seeing appearances as mind. We begin to understand that the body, the subtle body and the mind are all expressions that share the same origin point. They arise in the same way and they dissolve in the same way. It's just the period in between where they have so much variation. The body is not doesn't really seem to be very much like a thought, but when it dissolves and it's not there anymore, it was there a second ago and now it's not there, it's no different. It's a secret that we begin to understand by being brave and relaxed. We don't use thinking to understand this. We use seeing awareness
and seeing this creates another layer of relaxation, or it provokes another layer of relaxation, and that relaxation clarifies another layer of tension. You could say it heals another layer of wound, and we become more whole at each step, relaxation and awareness and this bravery that allows it heals us and we become whole.
Some traditions only give the initial instruction, and then they let the whole thing unfold organically. Other traditions break it into stages where there's a little bit of encouragement of how to do the first stage, and then how to recognize when it's time to open at the next stage, and a little bit of technique maybe goes in there, and it doesn't really matter which one we use, it's just terrific if we're able to find legitimate instructions that we have confidence in, whether they're just One basic approach or whether it's a graduated approach. The benefit of the graduated approach is that there are a little more checks and balances in it, so that we don't stray and get caught in thinking that we are relaxing, when, in fact, we've stopped relaxing and started imagining that we're relaxing. That happens, I can promise you, that happens. It certainly happened to me for years. So I think that some structure is good. Too much structure is probably too much structure, too many things to think about, to worry about, too many fine points that you feel, that you need to clarify
understanding that you are body, mind and awareness. Is a very easy structure, and then within that, you can insert an appreciation of the subtle body. The subtle body is a little less than body, but a little more than mind. It's between the two. It's very important when we relax in awareness, we take care of all three of those. The subtle body begins to clarify and relax and heal. We don't really need to know a lot about it, just like we don't need to know a lot about our bones or muscles. When we're lifting weights, we will get stronger, but knowing a little bit might be encouraging for us. So
Well, it's 656, so let's take a little bit of time for some conversation, and then we can all go on Our way. This is the second day of fall. You
You're welcome, Michelle.
I know that some people leave during the Q and A, which I completely understand if you're interested in engaging this stuff in a retreat, and you have some time this coming weekend, please join us. We're doing a Saturday and Sunday retreat in precisely this we'll be going through the four stages of relaxation and awareness. The Retreat is called becoming whole, and there's a link to it in the comment section, so that is available to you. I
You have one question in the chat for you, okay,
what is my Where'd it go? My lineage is that the question my lineage is Kagi Ning ma so I was trained for about 20 years in the Kagyu, anattara yoga lineage through Khenpo Sultan gyamso and Trungpa Rinpoche, Rinpoche and Mingyur Rinpoche. And then I began to which we all do move into Dzogchen. And so right now, my three, my two kachu teachers have they passed away last year, Trungpa Rinpoche, Rinpoche and Kimbo Sal just as I was moving into the Dzogchen world. So I study with chokey Nima, Mingyur Rinpoche and so Rinpoche every year. Well, not Mingyur Rinpoche every year, but when he comes to the US I do that's
that's wonderful. Okay, Evelyn, it's good to see you. See Good to see your name. There you.
Okay, if there are no questions, then I'm happy to adjourn and let everyone go. I know that you're all going to go practice now I'm going to go eat dinner. It's been quite a busy couple of days. Yesterday was my father's 82nd birthday, so we went to see him an hour away, and then he felt that he didn't really spend enough time talking to us. He was talking to everyone else. So he came over here, and I fixed him homemade Roman style pizza, which you would have to know why. Father to know how, what a simple pleasure that is for him. So we were able to watch him do things like this and make little moaning noises. And he's going on his last, he believes, his last big trip in a week, he's going with my stepmother to Japan. I'm very proud. Oh, thank you. Very proud of him. He has Parkinson's disease, and he still travels, so it was wonderful to hear him talking about all the restaurants he's going to, he's even going to some Zen temples. He doesn't practice meditation. He's one of the few people and in my tribe that has resisted it, my wife, my brother, his ex wife, we're all meditators, and my brother and wife and I are all students at the same teachers that I just mentioned, and he's very interested and he's very supportive, but he's he's very timid around meditation. It's been hard being a meditator, because I want everyone in my family to meditate, but I know that you can't. It just doesn't work. So you just have to be patient. You just have to just understand that they're not gonna so. But he's always asking, Are you teaching? Are you teaching tonight? You're gonna teach online. What do you say to them? And then he realizes, no, no, I don't want to know. And then he just, what kinds of questions do they ask? And I say, usually they ask questions, sometimes they don't. But then he'll just sort of ask, you know, where are they all? How old are they all? He used to think that everybody was like 20. I said, Dad, a lot of people your age, it's like, what people my age practice meditation.
It's probably pretty unusual if you have people in your family that practice if you're from the West, it's actually unusual for a lot of us to even have friends who practice. A lot of people are just solitary practitioners. If they didn't have nightclub or any of the online communities, they wouldn't have anyone. People can feel like it's not quite real if they don't have friends who practice. So these things are really good, really good to have these opportunities. Going, going gone or almost gone. Three, two. To two and a half. Okay, all right, everybody. Well, I'm glad that we didn't have any malfunctions tonight. You saw how disastrous my setup for the Dharma talk that I gave a couple nights ago. And whatever that was, I guess it was quite a few days ago. We had three interruptions as my camera died. But hey, I figured it out I just needed another one of these things. So now I have another one. I have a spare. So if this one breaks down, I can right away. We don't have any interruptions. And I know some of you have asked about the recordings of that talk, I was able to pull the files from the camera, and they're intact, so I'll edit that talk down and but we do have this retreat coming up this week, so I can't be certain that that talk will be available before the retreat, and then I have all the sessions from the retreat that we'll have to put up, but it will be up. You know me when I say I'm going to do something, sometimes I do so, all right, everybody, it's good to see you, and I'll see some of you this weekend. And any of you who are on the fence Don't be on the fence. It's a life changer to good group of people. Everyone's very friendly. There's no name calling allowed. And I'll see you at I don't know when I'm assuming that I'm going to be in my normal slot in October. Alyssa, do you know, am I? Yeah, yeah, first, like, the first Monday of the month? No, that would be, isn't. Does not mean I would wait. Okay, yeah, that's so probably the seventh. Yeah, perfect. Perfect, looking forward to it, everybody, Hey, this is a very good time right now. And this isn't just a plug for the retreat. This is not just a plug for the treat. This is a very, very good time to begin to systematically put relaxation into your meditation practice every day, even if you're doing other practices, to learn to drop and ride the energy, because we are entering a crazy period over the next couple of months, and you're not going to just relax in a month. You need to begin to build that into your nervous system, but I think you'll be very happy that you did that, and you'll be very good, a good resource for the people around you, because people are going bonkers, and relaxation solves the problem. So everybody, I wish you the very best, happy fall, see you soon. Bye, Jeffrey, thank you. Bye, bye.