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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

So, good morning everyone and welcome.

And what's on my mind, my heart at the moment is one of the purposes of mindfulness practice

is so that we can become our own teacher.

And I'd like to believe that part of my job is to work my way out of a job.

But people keep getting born and more people keep showing up so I keep having a job.

But the idea is to train people to be able to have the capacity of attention of mindfulness

so they can monitor themselves, know themselves well enough,

and to know where the choices are, to know where the places are they get stuck,

and to know how to unstick themselves, to know how to be present and be able to read oneself well enough

so that one can make wiser choices about how to live their life.

And so, you know, there's this wonderful expression like a whisper, a horse whisperer, you know.

And in a sense we're becoming our own whisperer where we can really learn to listen and track and feel

all the subtlest little movements within us of what's making us take, what's happening for us.

And in particular discovering where we have a choice, where do we have some choice

about how we meet our situation and what we pick up, what we engage in, what we put down, what we let go of.

And one of the key metrics for tracking ourselves, being our own teacher, is our suffering,

is our tension, is the stress that we have.

And this goes very much against many people's popular idea,

that when we suffer we're supposed to avoid it or fix it or drown it out or anything,

but bring a careful attention to it.

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