Good morning, everybody. My name is Christopher Maley, it is March 3 2024. And this is a coming to the path talk. I would like to think that I've spent many lifetimes coming to the path and finding the Dharma. But for the purposes of storytelling, I'm gonna stick to this current lifetime. And I'm gonna start the story when I was around eight, or nine. So I grew up here in Rochester, the oldest of four boys. And we were raised Roman Catholic. We were going to Mass each Sunday, and we would go to Mass on every major religious holiday. And we were saying grace at the table before dinner. And now I have no doubt that my parents were firm, believers, my mom at least. But as a child, it never really hooked me. It kind of felt like religion was this compartmentalized thing in our life. And I only ever really talked about God when we were in mass or during grace. And that felt a little inconsistent. I was very inquisitive and curious kid that was really searching for something deeper. And I had this sense that if I'm Roman Catholic, then shouldn't it be more infused into my daily life and not so separate? There was as if there were like two spheres of my childhood life. I would go to school, play with my friends, play video games, build Legos, do a lot of art. And all of that kind of existed in one category. And then separate from all of that, we also went to church. And it felt disconnected. And that disconnection was salient and it and it bothered me. There shouldn't be two categories. this thing we call religion should be more smoothly woven into the activities of my life. And there should only be one category. That was my thinking at the time. And I recognize it might be odd for an eight year old to be thinking in those terms. But that was just the kind of kid that I was. I was pretty serious as a kid. And I was interested in finding something that could guide me through this world. My mom likes to tell this story of when I was around this age eight or nine, I went to a friend's birthday party at Chucky Cheese. And for those of you who haven't been to Chucky Cheese, they have like this stage where life sized animatronic animals put on a concert. And so while all of my friends were up at the front, at the stage, singing and dancing along as the robots were putting on their show, I was at the back of the room, talking to the attendant about whether the robots are like remote controlled by a person, or whether they just have a pre programmed act that they're going through. And that was pretty emblematic of how I was as a kid. I was more interested in how things worked than anything else. And I'm 41 now and I think I'm probably more childlike now than I was back then. So that disposition of like being really interested in how things worked, and searching for a deeper truth, and not finding it in Christianity. set the stage for discovering Zen later on. So for the following years, I continued to go to Mass slowly but surely realizing that Christianity wasn't going to be able to answer the questions that I was facing. And I'm going to fast forward are now to 10th grade. So I'm like 15 or 16. In 10th grade from my global religions class, I was randomly assigned Tao ism as the topic of my final project. So, you know, I wrote five pages on the topic, and I did a presentation to my classmates. Back when doing a presentation meant, you print out a whole bunch of pictures, and you glue them on a poster board, and you bring the poster board up front with you. And you talk about the pictures just before PowerPoint. So the the reading that I did for that project was mainly the dowdy Chang. And that was my first exposure to Eastern thinking. And I fell in love with how imaginative the text was, and how descriptive it was, and how much it differed from Christianity. This quote is from the Tao de Ching. So the sage lives within nature, thinks within the deep, gives within impartiality and speaks within trust. He does not contend and non content against him. And so at, you know, 15 or 16 passages like that were just mind blowing. And I remember being struck by this idea. And I don't know if it appears in the doubt a Ching, if it was just in some other book I was reading for the project. But the message of you don't have to take all of this stuff at face value. Try out these practices, see if they work for you, and if so great, and if not no hard feelings. And it made it very approachable for me. And I remember thinking it was a very reasonable way to present a religion contrasted to the Roman Catholic messaging of this is the way it is. Or at least that's how I perceived the messaging. So from there, I just kept reading, reading everything I could find on Taoism, which inevitably led me to books on Zen. And eventually I found Zen Mind, beginner's mind by Shunryu Suzuki. And in that book, I found everything that was missing. I read that book 100 times. And I was consumed by the idea that I had found it. I like finally found the thing that I was looking for the answers to questions that I didn't even know I needed to ask were in that book. And it was like I found a treasure. And I carried it around with me in my backpack in high school, as if it was actually a treasure. I had a wish fulfilling jewel in my Jansport. And I still have that same copy from high school. So in that book, Suzuki Roshi gives instructions on how to do Zen. And so based on his instructions, I taught myself how to sit. And this is probably like the summer between 10th and 11th grade now. I would practice sitting in my bedroom, in secret. I kept the door closed and I didn't tell my parents what I was doing. My brothers knew that I was interested in Zen and that I was learning about meditation, but my parents did not know. I chose to not share with my parents my interest in Zen. Not because I would have been in trouble by any means. But I knew that my parents would be kind of disappointed because it meant I wasn't going to be a good Christian boy. I didn't want to disappoint them. So I practice then in secret for like the rest of my high school career.