The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audiodderma.org. So good morning everyone and welcome to this morning or this Monday here in California, morning in California.

And I feel like in this day in November just before Thanksgiving that here in the United States

we kind of turned a corner to a new season and with Thanksgiving coming up I thought it might be nice to spend the

week on a beginning of this winter season focusing on the topic of attitude.

There was a time when I taught the introduction to mindfulness meditation, which normally is a five-week program.

There was a period of time a few years where I did six weeks where one of the weeks was the

fifth week became a focus on mindfulness of attitude and attitude is very important because it's the, it's the background or the manner or the lens by which we see the world,

understand the world, behave in the world.

And it's often invisible because it's kind of like if you're looking you're focusing on what you're seeing.

You might not be paying any attention to the fact that you're straining or that you're afraid and you're looking for the

dangers or the safety or that you are thinking that you know in order to be have a good time and be safe or

be comfortable in yourself you have there has to be a pleasure and so we're looking for where is it

pleasant where's a nice things to do and so

there's an attitude behind or a belief behind how we see, how we talk, how we live, and those attitudes can be quite deep

and subconscious and that we don't often conscious of them,

one that I had in I started my meditation practice in the

monasteries. At some point I realized that no matter what I was

experiencing the belief the attitude I have towards all of

it was it's not the real thing so in any any meditation experience any way I was, like if I was calm, it wasn't a real calm.

If I was present, it wasn't a real way of being present.

If I was breathing, it wasn't the true way that you're supposed to breathe when you meditate.

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