In this evening’s talk, Michael discusses the opportunity that each and every life event, no matter how great or how small, how wonderful or how dark, gives each of us the chance to awaken. He points to what is always prior to any experience and equates this “priority” to the teaching at the core of the Zen koan: What did your face look like before your parents were born. From here the talk points to our tendency to cling to all aspects of our mind: our memories, our convictions and our plans. Tending to our awareness of this clinging is precisely, according to Michael, what frees us from it.