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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. Warm greetings for the last fifth and last talk of the series on attitudes.

And today the topic is going from stress to freedom.

And I want to propose that stress might be seen as a kind of attitude in that it can be pervasive, it can be

chronic, that we carry stress in our bodies and hearts and minds.

And it also, it's kind of like a mood

in that it has an influence on us.

We're not stress, if we're stress there's no there's a cost to being stressed it's not without an impact that it has on us and one of the impacts of stress can have, especially ongoing stress, is that it self-reinforces

that ongoing stress is stressful. Ongoing stress is stressful.

Ongoing stress is uncomfortable.

And then how we react to discomfort

is sometimes with more stress.

So if we are afraid, that's stressful to live with

chronic anxiety and but that discomfort of that anxiety makes us want to somehow respond, react, do something that reinforces it.

Because if we feel stress around being anxious with anxiety produces stress

that creates discomfort

and then we have more reason to be or more fuel

for being anxious. Same thing for being anxious.

Same thing with being angry and resentful or envious.

Same thing with having full of craving and and ambition

same thing with being confused.

There's many things which feel very uncomfortable

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