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

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Thank you for those of you who put the chats and the reds good amount of them, but when we finish, I'll read them all.

I appreciate it.

So now to give some context for that.

So this week, I'm going to continue with the general topic of compassion that I've done last number of weeks that I've been here.

And I kind of fill in some of the gaps from before.

So I did some weeks ago, I talked about five building blocks for compassion.

And that all the building blocks ideally would be there when we act in the world compassionately or when we feel compassion.

And so those are five A's, so awareness, attunement, appreciation, aspiration, and action.

And I did spend earlier, a week before all that, a whole week on awareness, different ways of being aware, in preparation for looking at compassion.

Today, I'd like to talk about the second building block, which is attunement.

And as an introduction to this topic of compassion and attunement, I'd like to repeat something I've tried to say before, is that if we have just one mode of being compassionate, it's easy to be overwhelmed.

It's easy for that mode to not be the appropriate mode for some situations we find ourselves in.

Some people have never kind of considered what compassion is, never considered different modes and ways of being with suffering.

Some people have only one mode of being with suffering.

Some people have self-suffering and others, and it's overwhelming.

Or it just kind of awakens all kinds of feelings of soreness, of overwhelm, of life is difficult, or I'm a victim.

It's so hard for me, I don't know what to do, and this is too much, I don't feel safe.

There's many kind of ways that people can be impacted by the presence of suffering.

Some people rush to fix it. Sometimes they rush to fix the suffering in the world, suffering of others, is not really caring for others as it is trying to stop being uncomfortable oneself.

They're trying to fix oneself by fixing others.

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