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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

Hello and welcome to our third talk on attunement.

The topic of attunement is practice of attunement.

Considered here one of the building blocks for compassion.

To have a rush to be compassionate before we've put in place the building blocks for it,

can easily lead to compassion being misguided and compassionate to be even detrimental

for those who are being compassionate.

These days it's been for a while now to talk about compassion fatigue, compassion overwhelm.

It seems strange that anyone would ever be exhausted or overwhelmed by compassion.

Compassion to be overwhelmed or fatigued by compassion would be like saying that the ocean is tired of being wet.

The warm day is exhausted from being warm.

Compassion by itself is not tiring, it's not exhausting, compassion by itself does not make us victims, it does not hurt us even.

What's difficult is when compassion is mixed in with all kinds of other attitudes and tensions and attachments and things.

But it's often considered to be part of compassion so people don't see the difference.

But if we have these building blocks in place to be compassionate, then compassion can flow through us in a way that's even nourishing for us,

much more beneficial for others without the exhaustion.

So one of these qualities is attunement, which this week I'm offering five different aspects of attunement.

And today with the letter U in the acronym touch is upright.

That when we encounter suffering, it's an occasion to make sure that we establish an uprightness.

And what that means is we find our place of strength.

And maybe it's an unfortunate term in the United States these days for how it's been used.

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