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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Are the doers of mindfulness, and doing a mindfulness the way it's usually instructed,

is you're supposed to know things or be aware of things. So the focus is on, okay,

there's a sound, I better hear it. If there's a breathing, I better be focused on it. And there

must be something to discover there or something's supposed to happen there. Let me really look at

the breathing. And so it's always the object of attention that sometimes gets the focus,

gets emphasized when we're talking about mindfulness,

or this awareness practice.

And there's definitely a place for that, and a very important part of the practice, in fact, that that's what we do. But it's only half the practice.

The other practice is how we're aware, how we're mindful,

how we are as we do this practice.

And to the degree to which we can adjust how we are,

it's okay to do that. And so if you're

straining to be aware, straining to practice, can you adjust that to not be using that forcefulness

or tightness to try to strain and accomplish something. If you're complacent, if yeah,

you know, I'm sitting here, I'll get around to being mindful, you know, but you know,

I have important fantasies to finish or, you know, I don't want to, I'm not supposed to be stressed

with this practice, so, you know, I'm just going to chill I'm not supposed to be stressed with this practice, so I, you know,

I'm just going to chill and hang out and just daydream for the first five minutes. Well,

I guess it turned out to be 15 minutes, but that was okay. We still have, you know, 30 minutes

left, so I'll get around to it. And then suddenly the bell rings, oh, I guess I never got around to it.

...