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

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Thank you.

We come to the last of these five talks on attunement.

With the acronym touch, there is thinking well, thinking carefully about the suffering we encounter.

Because the attunement we are talking about is the attunement that allows a meaningful, important, effective compassion, healthy compassion to come forth into our care for the world.

So before we are ready for compassion, we want to be attuned to the suffering and that can take some reflection and thinking.

We want to be open to it, willing to experience it.

And this willingness, this openness to it is a profound thing because it's part of the movement towards freedom, freedom from resistance, freedom from picking things up, freedom from blocking or...

The cut so free, we can open window and everything can pass through without touching the window, without affecting the window, breaking the glass.

Being upright, stable, strong, undefeated, uncollapsed, just fully present, not assertive, not withdrawing, but a strong sense of presence with suffering we are encountering.

And then communicating with people to really have been conversation with them and find out better what's going on. Don't assume we know, don't assume we know what's needed, but find out, be in communication, get the information.

And then today, the age of touch is help.

The important part of compassion is to help, to do something, to alleviate the suffering in oneself, in others and in the whole world.

But as a building block to become compassionate and to real compassionate action, the help that I'm going to talk about today is a little bit more modest or a stepping stone towards more full compassionate action.

To help, you want to be able to ask the question, what is helpful here? What is beneficial?

And in all directions, what is beneficial for oneself? Because if we leave ourselves too much out of the equation, then we can actually cause harm to ourselves and to others.

If we don't bring careful attention to our motivations, our emotions, our feelings, our reactions to the situation, and just feel like we're obligated to help someone and we're supposed to be altruistic and not care for ourselves at all, we actually can be so disconnected from ourselves that inadvertently unhelpful things will come out of us.

We say things, we express things, we feel kind of, we actually discover where maybe there's anger and trying to help someone because we don't really want to but we feel like we should.

And so what is helpful for ourselves in this situation? And this really questioning ourselves is very important also because with compassionate action, some people will live under rules of obligation and duty and the shoulds that are kind of authoritarian, kind of override any careful attention and can exhaust people.

Part of the compassion fatigue can sometimes come from the sense of obligation that I have to do this, I have to do this.

And so to really question that, what is beneficial here for me? And because when I'm in benefit, especially spiritually benefited,

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