Welcome to the August Edition of 'Your Monthly Wake Up Call'. Welcome to Issue 21 of Your Monthly Wake Up Call. That's 21 months of Waking Up the World, one sleeper at a time. In this issue: Becoming A Connoisseur of Life Wine With no messing around, let's go! *** Almost anyone can drink wine and experience its taste. Although you may not know what you are tasting, it takes zero skill to simply taste wine. Put it in your yap and you might say "dry" or "sweet" or "strong" without any wine tasting training at all. Big deal. It takes only a little skill to know the basic difference between red wine or white wine. One sip with my eyes closed and even I can almost instantly determine 'white or red', even after only a few wine drinking years. It takes considerable skill to determine the more refined aspects of wine tasting, such as geographic origin, producer, vintage, color, and many other factors that lay far beyond the untrained palette. After years of training and refining ones capacity to taste the subtleties of any kind of wine, one may become a wine connoisseur. A wine connoisseur would have developed a highly refined capacity to detect a full spectrum of sensory possibilities with even a small sip of wine. They can appreciate aspects of the wine tasting experience that are outside of the weekend wine lover. The word 'connoisseur', comes from connoistre, connaître meaning "to be acquainted with", and is defined as: 1 : EXPERT; especially : one who understands the details, technique, or principles of an art and is competent to act as a critical judge. "What the hell does this have to do with Waking Up" you might fairly ask? Bear with me, because here's the analogy. I am a connoisseur of the present moment. After sixteen years of 'moment tasting', my ability to discriminate and detect the subtleties and nuances of the living moment are such that I am an expert. I am highly 'acquainted with' what it is actually like to be alive as a body and mind. That does NOT mean thinking about my experience. Rather, it means NOT thinking about it, but experiencing directly without thought. It means plunging into my lived experience so fully and so attentively that little escapes my knowing. So what's the big deal with that? Well, here's the thing: Your Life is slipping past one sip at a time. How much experience are you squeezing from the Wine of Life? If you have not undergone Attention Training and have not developed a formal or informal practice that leads you to a Life of Awakened Attention, maybe you are like a wino, mindlessly guzzling Life Wine with no real appreciation or depth. Maybe you gulp your Life Wine inattentively, carelessly, like a bored teenager who drinks wine for the end result of intoxication. Or maybe you are like the multi-tasking housewife who drinks her Life Wine while distracted and fragmented, lost in activity like it's just another task. With Attention Training you can mindfully sip your Life Wine and extract all the subtle pleasures and all of the sorrows, all the joys and all of the beauty that is Life. Soon it will be over. What will it be for you? SWACK! Gratefully, Aaron McNaught A.K.A. The Wake Up Guy