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So this is the training of mindfulness. And of course, it's described in different foundations, if you will, the foundations of mindfulness: mindfulness of breath and body and the senses of the body, mindfulness of feelings, mindfulness of thoughts and mindfulness of the dharma, of the laws of impermanence and relationship with all things that rise and pass away. In this sense, mindfulness is a kind of intimacy. And Zen master Dogen, founder of Soto Zen, said that "To become enlightened is to become intimate with all things, to become intimate with this world." And when we become mindful, when we awaken in a moment of presence, there is a kind of intimacy with pleasure and pain, and gain and loss, and body and heart. All of these.

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Now, sitting in meditation is really a preparation for everything. Preparation for everything. But in particular, you'll hear in this poem from Tamara Engel, who was describing her last days with ovarian cancer. She said, "My days are short, and as I grow weaker, I experience so much gratitude for my meditation. Not only the joy and ease it brought, but the hard parts for every bored and restless sitting and every fearful cancer fantasy and every pain and ache I sat through and every itch I didn't scratch was a training for kindness, a training for the muscle, for bearing witness, for the trusting spirit that carries me now even as I face my death."

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And so the idea of mindfulness isn't to have a particular experience, but to become that space of mindful, loving awareness with joy and sorrow, and itches and gain, and loss and pain and pleasure. All of these to have a perspective, as the Ojibwa will say, "Sometimes I go about pitying myself when all the while I'm being carried by great winds across the sky." This is true. Our lives, so mysterious. Jon Kabat-Zinn, when he opened his first mindfulness-based stress reduction clinic in the basement of the medical school and did grand rounds and said to the other doctors there, "Send me the patients that you can't, given all you can, and you have been unable to help, that you don't have any more to give them."

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And a lot of the ones that came down were people who were in great pain. And Jon taught them how to pay attention to their pain, how to go into it and feel the throbbing and tingling and what made it up, and how to move away from it, and how to hold it in a field of compassion and kindness. And a great deal of the suffering was not the pain itself, but was the fear and the story and the worry. It'll be this way. It'll get worse. I'm going to die. All the kind of things. And John said, "Let's be here a moment at a time, and let me teach you this mystery of mindful awareness that will liberate you even as you go through something so difficult."

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So we learn to be present for this body with all its beauty and pleasure and ecstasy, loving each other, making love, walking in the high mountains, listening to music, being sick, being lost. We learn how to be present for our humanity and how it's mirrored in this very body. This is your life. You get it all.

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We also learn in the foundations of mindfulness how to be present for feelings and thoughts without awareness. We get caught in fight, flight or freeze. Something difficult happens. It's scary. And we contract and our alarm system goes on. We get filled with adrenaline.

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There's some way, and without mindfulness, we can be stuck in it for weeks or months or years, that suffering. But feelings, fear, anxiety, anger, frustration, rage, joy, delight, sweetness, connection, love, judgment, attachment, grief, sadness, all the emotions that make up the heart.

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It's possible, it's liberating. It's delicious to be able to name the feelings and say, "Oh, this is fear. I know you." The first time it's hard, and the 25th time it's hard. But sometime maybe after 50 or 60 or 80 times, and you go, "Fear."

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And the hands are sweaty and the palms and the breath stops and so forth, and you say, oh, fear. And there's a little half smile like, "Oh Mara, I see you," said, the Buddha under the bodhi tree. "Is that you again?" And you're free. And I remember riding in a pickup truck with my teacher, Ajahn Chah, going to this temple on the Cambodian border.

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And the young guy who was driving us was speeding along on this dirt road that was only about one and a half lanes wide. And once in a while in the mountains, a logging truck or a bus would come by and we'd have to pull over and just barely inch by, but he was racing along it, and I was scared. And then I looked over at my teacher and I saw his knuckles were white, he was holding on to. And finally we pulled into the temple and the pickup truck stopped. And I took a big breath and I looked over at Chah and he smiled and he said, "Scary ride, wasn't it?"

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And it was such a beautiful moment. He wasn't like, denying that, oh, yeah, I'm Mr. Calm or something. It was a scary ride. We were in the amusement park, and it was one of those scary rides, I'll tell you. And it was just with mindful, loving awareness. That's a scary ride. That's the way things are. We can acknowledge in the simplest way. What is this emotion? Sadness, longing, grief. And accept it. It's part of our common humanity. Sometimes we weep because of loss and sorrow and things that have happened. Sometimes we experience a sadness that's not so personal.

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In meditation it's called the tears of the way. It comes because is just open and touched. And it's not that somebody's done something to you have you lost something? But the heart just becomes tender and open. And the tears also arise for the poignancy and the beauty of this world together.