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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

So this is the second talk on the topic of attunement.

And in other words, for this could be harmony or balance.

It's the topic of relationship to compassion and our connection to suffering and others and in ourselves.

And to simply just experience suffering in the world or in ourselves in the usual habit,

habitual way of doing it, might not be in harmony, might not be attuned well.

And it is probably a little bit of a challenge to think about being attuned to suffering.

But it's having just the right level of connection, just the right way of being present for it.

That we're not letting it impact us negatively.

It doesn't strike the windows in our hearts so that they've shatter.

And it doesn't, we don't kind of close down or resist what's happening.

And so, in finding ourselves attuned, I like the idea of thinking of it kind of like tuning a guitar string.

So that the different strings are attuned to each other.

Somehow they exist in the right relationship to each other.

So that when we're encountering suffering, we can ask ourselves, how do we tune ourselves?

How do we establish a useful way of being aware and present and attitude towards this that's here?

And I think it's a nice principle to think that every encounter with suffering is different and requires a different attunement.

What is this?

And as soon as we start looking and thinking about attunement, then we're doing something very significant,

which is we're not just simply a victim of suffering, a passive recipient of it,

but we actually have some agency.

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