 Good afternoon and welcome to the City of Fort Worth Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month program. My name is Elizabeth Van and I serve on the City's Diversity and Inclusion Employee Committee representing the Police Department. The DNI Employee Committee leads the employee work group working under the leadership of the Diversity Inclusion Department that planned today's program. I'm excited to introduce our presenter, Dr. Dennis, who will share with us not only information about the Asian history and tradition of meditation and mindfulness, but also lead us through some exercises that I think we can all benefit from in the workplace. But before I do that, I want to invite the City's Chief Equity Officer and Director of the Diversity and Inclusion Department, Christina Brooks, to give us a few remarks. Well, good afternoon, everyone. You'll have to excuse my voice. I'm getting over a little cold, but I didn't want to take some time to introduce you to our program today and welcome you. So as you know, Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month is an annual celebration that recognizes the historical and cultural contributions of individuals and groups of Asian and Pacific Islander descent to the United States. The Asian population is growing at a faster percentage in North Texas than any other demographic. That's according to the U.S. census data. In Tarrant County alone, 129,437 Asians were counted in the 2020 census, a 57 percent jump from 10 years earlier. At 1.5 million, Asians now make up 6 percent of the total Texas population. Now if you've attended these before, you know that I do some historical research for each one of our months where we are remembering and celebrating different cultures. And so in conducting this historical research on notable Fort Worth Asian residents and businesses, there is a name that rose to the top of the list. His name is Kenetaro Fujita. You may be familiar with what remains of his legacy, the James Fujita House. Originally built in 1915 for Thomas and Annie James, the home was purchased four years later by Kenetaro Fujita. Fujita served as president of a Japanese cotton exporting firm, the Go Show Company, incorporated in 1917 and dissolved just after the U.S. entry into World War II. In 1936, after Fujita returned to Japan, he sold the home to the company. If you've been by there, out on College Avenue, you'll notice that there are features of the James Fujita House, which include the gamble roof, front porch columns and bolsters. It was recorded as a Texas historic landmark in 1986. But after Fujita left in 1936, it would be 37 years later when Fort Worth would once again recognize the important contribution of Asian culture with the opening of the Fort Worth Japanese gardens in 1973. It is a traditional strolling garden with winding paths through landscapes and around ponds. The garden consists of 7.5 acres filled with cherry trees, Japanese maples, magnolias, bamboo, bridges and ponds filled with koi fish. Except in the spring, there are few flowers blooming in the Japanese garden due to the Japanese practice of mono noowari. This translates into transient or bittersweet beauty, meaning that if the garden was always blooming, it would never be special. Mono noowari simply means the pathos of things, but it can also mean empathy for things. In Japanese culture, it is a crucial term. The word mono means things or things while owari means feeling or sentiment, and the particle node denotes something an item has. As a result, mono noowari refers to pathos or profound feelings of things, as well as the strong emotions that objects can provoke or instill in us. It also refers to the bittersweet knowledge that everything is impermanent. It is the realization that everything in life is fleeting. The impermanence of youth, the dying of romance, the passing of seasons are not to be mourned but to be embraced and cherished in their impermanence because that is where their beauty lies. Things would lose their ability to move us if there was no change, and the most valuable aspect of life is its unpredictability. For half a century now, the Japanese garden has been the oasis of serenity in the middle of a city, a place for retreat, relaxation, and meditation. It's hard to believe the site had previously served as a gravel pit, a swatter's camp, and a dump. The Fort Worth Parks Department later the Parks and Recreation began its work in 1968 clearing the site, which the original architect Al Kamatsu once called a tremendous ecological disaster. But over time they built ponds and waterfalls, shaped trails and paths, and selected plants that would lend Japanese beauty to a corner of Texas. Today, we hope to bring a little serenity right here to City Council Chambers. So we invite you to participate in our program, and we hope that you enjoy it. Thank you. So thank you, Elizabeth and Christina, and I just want to echo her comments about the Japanese gardens. They're wonderful. Whenever a family member or a friend comes to visit me, I'm from the north. I'm from Chicago and Illinois and Wisconsin, and a lot of my friends and family will come to escape the cold, and so I always take them to the gardens. So anyway, today what we'll do are some very short breathing and meditation practices, and I'll interweave those into the program. I'll talk a little bit about the kind of historical background of Asian religious and meditation traditions, but I'll also talk about a group that we have on the TCU campus called the Calm Studies Group, and I'll say more about them. And if you're interested in anything I have, I say today, any of these practices, and you want to learn more, you can just reach out to Veronica. She has my email, and I'm happy to take any questions you might have. So we're going to start with a very simple practice. I'm combining a few things here. It'll be about three minutes. Ideally, you might just stop eating for a second if that's OK. And so with all of these practices, you want to sit up straight, just have your back straight. You don't want to be tight, but you want to be upright. And if it's comfortable for you, try to put your feet flat on the floor, and then just take your hands, and you can put them in a comfortable position. When we start this practice, I'll invite you to close your eyes if you're comfortable with that. If not, you might just kind of look down and just squint a bit so you're not distracted by what's going on around you. And so we're going to start with a very simple breathing practice. It goes by three numbers, four, seven, eight. And the four is a reference to the inhalation. And so you'll inhale, and in your mind, you'll count silently up to four. So inhale, four, hold for count of seven, and then exhale for count of eight. When you do the inhalation, see if you can breathe from the belly, from the diaphragm, and breathe in through your nose, and really feel the air come and fill your lungs. And then you hold, counting to seven, and then you exhale, counting to eight. We'll do this two times. And this will, you cannot avoid this. This is a physiological response. You'll calm down. After I do my second four, seven, eight, I'll wait for maybe 10 seconds, and I'll start speaking. And I'll lead you through just some very simple practices. And I just want to, excuse me, I want to mention that the practices I'm teaching you today, they're not coming out of a particular religious tradition. They're not Buddhist. They're not Hindu. These are secularized versions of these practices. And this is a very important point because I think it makes it more accessible to people who are not maybe interested in the religious part. I will be talking about that today, but the practices are not that way, okay? So just to reiterate, we'll do the four, seven, eight breathing practice. Just do it two times. Really try to breathe in and just let that, whatever tension you're holding, could be maybe you had a difficult conversation this morning or somebody cut you off in traffic, whatever it is. Just imagine breathing that out, okay? Any questions? Okay, here we go. Two rounds of the four, seven, eight. Just keep your eyes closed and now I'll start speaking then. Here we go. Okay, I invite you to bring your attention to the sensation of your feet as the resting against the floor. And just try to maintain your awareness on the sensation of your feet, resting on the floor. If you're comfortable, you can imagine your feet touching Mother Earth or maybe just the carpet underneath your feet, whatever is comfortable. This is a very simple exercise. We teach this a lot. And it's a technique that will help you slowly. If you do it regularly, it will help you build your capacity to maintain your awareness in the present moment. Just watch your mind. Most of us, our minds go back and forth into the future, into the past. And we miss out on the present. If your mind has wandered away, don't worry about it. This is natural in meditation. We call this the monkey mind, the drunken monkey. Just acknowledge it and in a very friendly way, just bring your mind and your attention, your awareness back to the sensation of your feet, resting comfortably on the floor. We often call this an embodied practice, which simply means we're using a part of the body to build our capacity to stay in the present moment. This particular practice is often used in trauma therapy. It's been discovered that this practice can help those who've experienced severe trauma, PTSD. So now we'll transition and we'll do one more short practice. And this is probably the most basic form of meditation. And it goes by different names. I think the most common is breath awareness. And so I just invite you to bring your attention to your breath. As it goes in and out, as you inhale and you exhale, don't try to control your breath, just breathe naturally. And just see if you can maintain your awareness on your breath. As it goes in and out, in and out. The breath is often described as being the bridge between the mind and the body, the breath can bring us back to the present moment. So I won't speak for maybe 30 seconds. And during the silence, I invite you simply to follow your breath. And if your mind wanders away, just acknowledge it in a friendly way. Always in a friendly way. Just bring it back to the breath. Here we go. Okay, and to wrap up this practice, what we'll do is we'll take two deep breaths. And I invite you as you take those deep breaths and don't rush. As you take these breaths, just bring to mind something that you're grateful for. This we call gratitude practice. There's actually a lot of research that shows developing a gratitude practice can have all kinds of positive effects on our minds, on our bodies, on our connections to others. And we'll wrap up today with a short gratitude practice, which I'll explain later. So just to recap, just take two deep breaths. And as you do so, just bring to mind something that you're grateful for. It can be a person, it can be an idea. Maybe it's a thing, maybe it's your lunch today. Maybe it was particularly tasty and you're grateful for it. Or maybe it's a piece of clothing, whatever it might be. After your second exhalation, just go ahead and slowly open your eyes and we'll move on. Here we go. Well, I wanted to express my gratitude to you for inviting me here today. It's, I think I'm doing that, sorry. Maybe I should stand up. It's really, it's really a pleasure to be here. So thank you for inviting me. So let me just look at my notes real quick here. Okay. So I do want to say a few things about what we just did. I teach this, those practices we just did, I teach a lot. And 478 is something I do with students. And like when I go to a program like this, but with students, I always say to them, if you remember nothing from what I say today, you know, with young people especially, there's just such a high level of distraction. In fact, it's really causing a lot of issues with students' ability to pay attention. And as you probably know, there have been some really alarming studies and statistics that are coming out about the mental health of young people. There was a CDC report that came out in February of this year. And it gave a number of really alarming statistics about the mental health of teens who are then going into college. But things like depression, anxiety, vital ideation, just very serious stuff. And so I tell them, if you remember nothing else, remember this practice because it is really powerful for calming your system down. Many of my students have really debilitating anxiety. Some get panic attacks. And this 478 practice is really useful for that. I've had lots of students who've talked about how much it's helped them. With test anxiety, I had a student who had a fear of flying. And she got on a plane and she could feel herself constricting. And so she did this practice and it really helped her. So anyway, please remember this practice. Next time you get really stressed, give it a try. I also recommend the gratitude practice. You can have a gratitude practice in many ways. You can keep a gratitude journal. You can express gratitude verbally. But there's a researcher out in the University of California system, Robert Ammons, who studies this. And the research is very clear that people who practice this regularly really have positive benefits. So what I'd like to do is go through. I have a powerful reason to go through this. I'm causing a lot of commotion. It's supposed to be calming. And I'm giving you static. I apologize. So I have some slides and I'm going to go through those. And again, if you have any questions, you can raise your hand. Or you're welcome to contact me later. So let me say just a little bit about myself. You can see my name is Mark then. As I teach in the TCU religion department, I came to TCU in 2007. My background is in Buddhism. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. I was born in Chicago, but grew up in Madison. And I went to the University of Wisconsin study business finance. And I worked for a couple of years in business. I was working in a mutual fund in Boston and kind of had, I'm sure you all know, the midlife crisis. I had the midlife crisis. But much earlier, it was the quarter life crisis. So anyway, it's kind of a long story. But it led me to Japan and to study Zen Buddhism. So I went to Japan in 1987. And I lived there for almost five years. I love Japan. I consider myself a practitioner of Zen Buddhism. My research is in the Japanese language. And I study Buddhism. My position at TCU is East Asian religions. And so that includes Buddhism. But Taoism, Confucianism, and some other traditions. So you can see that the topic is meditation of mindfulness in Asian religious traditions. And so I'm going to start and just talk a little bit about these different Asian meditation traditions. Each of them is quite different. So we're going to start with a broad lens. And then we'll narrow it down to Buddhism, which is what I practice. And also what I study. And you can see I've listed some, not all, of the major religious traditions that come out of Asia that have a meditation or mindfulness component. So Buddhism, which I've been talking about, and I'll return to in just a minute. Hinduism, which is very broad. And I just included yoga because yoga is generally quite well known in the United States. There's lots of yoga studios, many of my students practice yoga, but there's many other traditions within Hinduism. Taoism is one of the two major religious traditions in China, the other being Confucianism, so Taoism. And then the last two are maybe religions that you've never heard of, or maybe you've just heard their names, but don't know much about. And those are Jainism and Sikhism. Jainism goes back about 2,500 years to the same time when the Buddha was alive. But Sikhism is much more recent. The founder of Sikhism was a Guru Nanak, and he lived in the 1500s. So these are just a few of the traditions. And then you can see this next slide is the Indian meditation tradition. So we're kind of narrowing it down. And one of the really interesting parts of these traditions, and my students always find this fascinating, I teach at TCU, and you will not be surprised to know that many of my students are Christians. It's the sea in TCU. And so the worldview that is expressed or undergirds these traditions is very different than Christianity or the monotheistic tradition, so Islam, Christianity, Judaism. And it's often described using these four key concepts. And so the first concept is these are Sanskrit words. And the first one is samsara. And samsara simply means something that goes around in a circle. It has these cycles. And the belief in all of the Indian religious traditions that I listed is that there's this circular pattern that governs the cosmos. But then you can narrow that down and look at it within the individual life cycle. And as you may know, these traditions believe that when we live in the world, we die, and then we come back into the world, this is the cycle of samsara. The next idea, and this is one that my students usually have heard of, is karma. Karma, I think, is a simple idea. I ask my students what you know about karma, and most of them will say, what goes around comes around. And that's actually a very good definition. Karma, it's very simple, and it's when you look at it that way, it's easy to understand. However, it gets really interesting when you dig into it and talk about how these different traditions understand karma. And I'll just give you one example. In Buddhism, the Buddhists generally believe that it's the intention behind an act. What did you intend? So if I am walking along and I step on a bug, but it's because I didn't see the bug, that's a very different kind of karmic act than if I see a bug and I deliberately step on it. That's just a simple example. But the other traditions, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, they all have their own kind of interpretation of that. The next term is atma, which is generally translated self, sometimes soul. You've probably heard of Gandhi, a figure who I'm fascinated with. I do a big section in one of my courses, World Religions on Indian Independence. And Gandhi is one of the main figures. But Gandhi is often referred to as the mahatma. Maha in Sanskrit means great or big. And you put two words together, those two words together, self or soul and maha, great. And you get the great soul. So Gandhi is known as the mahatma. And if somebody says in India, the mahatma, everybody knows it's Gandhi. And then the last one is moksha. And I love this word because it sounds like moka. And students relate to that. And moksha is actually, it comes from a Sanskrit verb, muc, m-u-c, which means to be free or to liberate. It is an important part of traditional yoga, this idea that you do not just the physical, the asanas, the physical practices, but there's an ethical component. There's breathing, there's meditation, there's diet. And all of those are meant to lead you to this state of liberation. And it's liberation or freedom from this cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. That is the basic worldview of each of those traditions that come out of India. When you start to look at how they understand karma and moksha, then it gets a little more complicated. In fact, Buddhists sometimes use the word moksha. More commonly, they use the word nirvana, which I imagine is a word you're familiar with. So I'm going to move on here and talk about meditation and mindfulness in Buddhism. And this is meant to just introduce you to the basic ideas of Buddhism and help you understand why many Buddhists, now some Buddhists don't do much meditation, but many do, especially in the tradition I come out of, the Zen Buddhists. This is meant to help you understand why they do this. And so the first key concept is the basic statement about the nature of this world that we're inhabiting here. And this is the teaching that the Buddha gave to his disciples when he started teaching some 2,500 years ago. There's a lot of debate about when exactly he lived. He was active in what is the northeastern part of India. But anyway, these truths are just a basic statement about reality. And the first one is life in the world is characterized by dukkha, which is often translated as suffering, which is kind of an unfortunate translation. What it really means is dissatisfaction or dis-ease with things in the world. We want something, but I think as Christina was saying when she was talking about the gardens, everything is constantly changing. And so if we cling to something, whatever it is we cling to, it can be we want to be famous or we want to be rich, whatever a person, those things will inevitably change. And so there's this suffering or dukkha that is caused by that. The second truth is this dukkha, this suffering is caused by craving, literally thirst. We want stuff. When I was young, I wanted to be rich. I told my students this. That's why I got into business. I wanted to be rich, rich, rich. That's a very common, obvious kind of craving. The third truth is if you remove craving, you will remove suffering. And then the fourth one is the path, the Eightfold Path. And that path has eight parts. I'm not going to list those, but it has three main sections. One is ethics. You see this in all religious traditions, whether it's Christianity or Hinduism or Buddhism. Then what's called wisdom. But then the third part, which is what we're most interested in is mental cultivation. Mental cultivation is referring to things like meditation and mindfulness. The belief in Buddhism is that if we can change our minds, if we can reorient our consciousness stream, we can change how we exist in the world, how we feel about ourselves, how we relate to others. And one of the related concepts is interdependence, our connection to others. When we slowly are able to reduce our sense of being separate, isolated selves, then the logical implication is that we connect. We connect to others. And this opens up a really interesting, can open up an interesting space in our lives. And then, as I said before, nirvana is the ultimate goal of Buddhism. And that's release liberation from this cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Sorry, my voice is a little crackly today. So I want to talk a little bit about my experience. I mentioned I had this quarter life crisis. This was 1987. It was a long time ago. And I had some friends working in the mutual fund who'd been to Japan. And they said, thank you. They had studied Eastern religions. It was all the same. It was all this stuff that I've just talked about. And so I mean, I'd say it was a quarter life crisis. It was serious. It was really destabilizing. I had imagined myself in one way. All of a sudden, that was taken away from me. And so I started doing meditation. And it just calms me down. And it was wonderful. So I've been doing it. What is that? 35, 36 years every day. Maybe once a year. I'll miss a day. But it's very rare. So in 1987, I went to Japan. I just got on a plane and flew to Tokyo. I met a guy on the plane. He was an American guy who's been there. And I said, I don't know where I'm going. And he said, well, you can tie her along with me. And we got on a train. Fortunately, we got there on a Sunday. And it wasn't too crowded. And we went to a place called Shinjuku Station. It may sound familiar to some of you, because it was in downtown Fort Worth. Over on Magnolia, Shinjuku Station, a wonderful restaurant. It's full of neon. It's just a very exciting place. Anyway, I ended up living in Japan for five years, doing a lot of Zen meditation retreats. And they were wonderful. It was somewhere just a weekend, somewhere for about a week. And it was just so anyway, I spent about five years there. And during that time, I was able to travel in Asia. I went to places like China, Indonesia, Singapore, but also India. I went a couple times to India. And I just am fascinated by India and Japan. And in 1992, I decided to move to India. And I lived on a Hindu ashram, not a Buddhist one, a Hindu ashram, for two and a half years. I was a gardener. It was wonderful. It was very simple. They had electricity, but you had to pump your water. You had to wash your clothes by hand. And I told my students, they just can't imagine. They just can't imagine. No newspaper, but it was wonderful. So I spent about eight years overseas. I came back and I went through the PhD program in Buddhist studies at the University of Wisconsin and eventually ended up at TCU. So I want to kind of move through this because I want to be mindful of our time. And I do want to end with a practice. So you can see this next slide is the mindfulness movement in the West. And I've just included two photos. So mindfulness, am I doing that? And so I don't know if this one's working. It is? OK. So mindfulness is one of those mental cultivation practices that's common in Buddhism. So meditation and mindfulness. And Buddhists will say they're different. They're often put together. They're conflated in the United States. But mindfulness is more paying attention. Like right now I'm speaking. And maybe you're listening, but then you're mind, what we call the monkey mind. It intervenes. And all of a sudden you're thinking, oh, it's going to be 1 o'clock. I've got a meeting or whatever it might be. And so mindfulness is learning slowly. It's painfully slow to maintain your awareness. Like that exercise we did with our feet on the floor. It's just teaching you to maintain your awareness. And it's like anything. If you've never lifted a weight or gone running, it's very hard. This whole last semester I was technologically cursed in my class. I had all these problems, which I don't normally have. And I can see it's followed me here. I'm sorry. But anyway, that's what mindfulness is. And there's a mindfulness movement. A boom, a craze in the United States and elsewhere. And there's many figures. But these are the two I think I have most commonly. One is Thich Nhat Hanh. I'm a huge fan of Thich Nhat Hanh. He died in January of 2022. He was a wonderful human being. Martin Luther King, Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. He saw the horrors of the Vietnam War. He and his Zen monk, his traditions stayed neutral in the war. And many of his fellow monks and nuns and children under his care were killed in the violence. And he saw this. And so he created a movement. I would consider myself to be part of this called socially engaged Buddhism, which simply means to be mindful of what's going on in the world, in our society, to all the kinds of suffering that exist. You might think of our society, things like systemic racism, food insecurity, poverty, climate change, and many, many others. And so his basic message was we look at that. We don't turn away from the suffering if you see a homeless person. You don't turn away from it. And then you do whatever you can to reduce that suffering. And that's his message. And so he's one of the key figures known for the mindfulness movement. The other is John Kabat-Zinn, a very different person, a scientist. And he is probably the figure best known for creating the mindfulness movement in the West, especially the secularized version. And his experience was he was working with women with breast cancer at a hospital in Amherst, Massachusetts. And he started teaching them these practices. It's not a cure for cancer. But what it can do is help the women who are experiencing physical pain, anxiety, all sleep issues, he discovered it could be a very powerful way to help them reorient their minds towards what they were experiencing. And he created a program that is very popular and really well studied. It's called mindfulness-based stress reduction. Oftentimes it's just M-B-S-R. He's one of the really important figures in the mindfulness movement. Oops, what did I do? What did I do? Oh, no, no. I told you I'm cursed. OK. So I want to just take a few more minutes because I do want to do one more practice. I'd hope to do a few more. But as a typical academic, I love to hear my own voice. So I've written the names of some really great books up here. If you're interested in mindfulness, all of them are really accessible. The first is the Miracle of Mindfulness. That's by Tich Nhat Hanh, the first figure I talked about. It was written as a letter to one of his followers who was experiencing the incredible violence the Vietnam War. And how do you practice these kinds of things when you see people around you dying? It's a wonderful book. I teach a course in Buddhism, and I use it often. The next book is by John Kabat-Zinn, the second figure. He's written two books, and both of them have great titles. Wherever you go, there you are, meaning you can try to get away from yourself. You can go to another place. You can drink alcohol or whatever it is. But there, you're still there. And the other one, the other title, is Full Catastrophe Living. I love that title. It's like most of us live. It's a wonderful, both of his books are wonderful. The next one is called The Mindful 20-Something. This is written by Holly Rogers, who's a medical doctor. She's a practicing psychiatrist. She teaches at Duke University. She works in the counseling center. I teach this every semester, this book. It's wonderful. It's cheap. It's about $10. It's written in very accessible language. She includes science notes that are easy to understand. She includes practices, and it has lots of wisdom. And then the final one is called 10% Happier. And that is by a former ABC News journalist, Dan Harris. I think some of you will recognize his name and probably know who he is. But he was very skeptical of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. He kind of freaked out while he was on the national news. And he couldn't breathe, and he couldn't speak. And so it was kind of a long story, but that led him to meditation. And so he's become like the ex-smoker who's really anti-smoking. And he's become like that. And he's got a great platform. He's got the book and a podcast called 10% Happier, which I can't recommend enough. He's really good at interviewing people. He doesn't talk too much. So let me just say I'm not going to go through all these slides, but we have a group on campus, the TCU campus, called CalM Studies. And CalM is an acronym. It means Compassionate Awareness and Living Mindfully. Our group started as a meditation and mindfulness group in 2012. If you're interested in any of this, please write to Veronica. And I'll put you on our mailing list. We're very active. We have all kinds of, a lot of this stuff is virtual because of the pandemic, which I think we're coming out of. But anyway, I'll just show you these slides. And then I'll do a short practice with you. It's a wonderful practice. It's the compassion practice. And here's a, this is the image that appears on our website. And it talks about kind of our pillars, belonging, wisdom, compassion, and flourishing. That's our, you can see, we just met yesterday with this group. This is our advisory committee. They're just wonderful, wonderful group. These are our current and former student leaders. And then the last thing is we're part of a group that's called the Flourishing Academic Network that has these wonderful institutions like Brown University, Stanford, but TCU is also part of it. And here's what we're hoping to do. We eventually would like to build a center and have a room like this one. But as you know, that takes a lot of money, which we don't have. So I put questions, but I'd really like to do one more practice with you. And then I'm happy to take any questions. I'll stay. And if you want to ask me anything, I'd be happy to take your question. So just go ahead and sit up straight like we did before. And just put your feet flat on the floor, back straight, hands resting in a comfortable position. We'll start with one deep breath. And then I'll explain this exercise. And then we'll do just a abbreviated version of it. So let's take one deep breath, just like we did before. Breathe in through the nose. Start from the belly, fill the lungs. Here we go. So this practice is often called the meta. Meta is spelled M-E-T-T-A. Meta is translated usually as loving kindness, but sometimes as compassion. There's all kinds of ways that you can think of this Sanskrit word. And so the basic practice is that we will bring into our minds particular people or groups of people. And I will say out loud a set of short phrases, and they are may you be well, may you be happy, may you be at peace. And so as you imagine this person or group of people, I'll say it out loud, those phrases, and then just repeat them silently to yourself as you imagine this person. And we always start with ourselves because many of us engage in negative self-talk. And this can be really destructive. And so an important part of this practice is to learn to look at ourselves and to talk to ourselves in a different way. And so I invite you to bring an image of yourself, of your own face, into your awareness. You might imagine looking yourself in the mirror this morning as you're getting ready to come to work, maybe in a photograph or a reflection in a body of water, whatever. Whatever is comfortable for you. And so with that image of yourself before you, please repeat the following phrases. May you be well, may you be happy, may you be at peace. May you be well, may you be happy, may you be at peace. Now please draw into your awareness somebody you love dearly, somebody you're very close to, a person who you know, you know deep down has your best interest at heart. Somebody who's always been there for you. This could be a parent, a grandparent, maybe an aunt, an uncle, a sibling, or other family member. It could be your romantic partner, maybe your best friend, it could even be your pet. And so with their face before you, please tell them, may you be well, may you be happy, may you be at peace. May you be well, may you be happy, may you be at peace. Now please draw into your awareness somebody, somebody who you know quite well, but you also know is struggling, is suffering acutely, and this could be for all kinds of reasons. Maybe it's a serious illness. Maybe it's a bad, toxic relationship, a financial or food insecurity, all kinds of issues could cause this. And so just bring an image of that person into your mind's eye and tell them, may you be well, may you be happy, may you be at peace. May you be well, may you be happy, may you be at peace. And now we'll do the part that often people find a bit difficult, and I want to explain why we're doing this. So I'm going to invite you to bring into your awareness somebody, somebody you find to be difficult, a person maybe who annoys you, this could be because of a particular incident, maybe today, but it could also be because of a pattern of behavior or speech. And we do this for a couple of reasons. One is because we simply do not know what is causing a person to act in this way that we find to be annoying or difficult or offensive. We don't know what is behind that. But the other thing is, many of us, and I would say this is true of me, we can have these kinds of negative experiences and then get stuck in this negative cycle of this loop of toxicity. And the research shows that if we do this practice regularly, and for it takes some time, but slowly, slowly those ruts get more and get less deep, they're more shallow. So we spend less time in that negative loop. And so I invite you to bring into your awareness the image of a person who has annoyed you. And please repeat the following phrases. May you be well, may you be happy, may you be at peace, may you be well, may you be happy, may you be at peace. Let's bring into our awareness our group that's here today that's come in the middle of the day to learn a little bit about Asian religious traditions, their meditation, and mindfulness practices. And so in whatever way is comfortable for you, just bring our entire group into your awareness. And please tell us, may you be well, may you be happy, may you be at peace, may you be well, may you be happy, may you be at peace. And then the last group is what Buddhists would call sentient beings, all beings, humans and non-human animals, all the bugs and critters that exist in our world, but other elements of the natural world, rivers, plants, trees, fruits, vegetables, mountains, all of it. Just bring it into your awareness in whatever way is comfortable for you. And please tell us, may you be well, may you be happy, may you be at peace, may you be well, may you be happy, may you be at peace. And now to wrap up this practice, we'll do what we did before when we started. And that is just to take two deep breaths. Just bring to mind something that you're grateful for, or maybe something different from the first time. And after your second exhalation, go ahead and slowly open your eyes, and then we'll wrap things up. Here we go. Thank you, everybody, for coming. Sorry about all the crackling. That's a bit distracting. But I really appreciate your coming today. And I'll stick around if anybody has any questions or comments. If you want to get on our mailing list, I'd be happy to help you. I think Elizabeth has some final words. That was a great presentation. Thank you. I think we all learned something new that we know before and are hopefully feeling less stressed after the mindfulness exercises that Dennis led us through. Thank you, Dr. Dennis. And thank you all of the employee who helped plan today's program and to our audiences for making the time today to help us celebrate Asian-American Pacific Islander Heritage Month. And I also want to acknowledge that this program would not be possible without the support of our city's leadership and diversity inclusion department in its effort to promote the quality of life in Fort Worth. And that includes opportunity and access for all. So everyone be sure to read the brown up to learn about opportunities and help plan and attend future programs. Thank you.