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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

Okay. Okay, so yeah, it, what may be the same.

practice is, what may we say, it's about coming home and leaving home. It's about loving what we have always loved and also learning to love new things.

The practice is a kind of sort of dialectic between incredible closiness and venturing out into the world in order to be startled. So we come home to what we've,

what we've sort of long known, long loved, we come home to what is familiar.

Maybe we've been neglecting what we know or what we love, but the darma when our heart is ripe and we hear it it reawakens something

and it has the flavor of recollection. Plato said all knowledge is

recollection. It has that feeling of like very familiar kind of a home.

And even though I had a fortunate childhood, maybe because I had a fortunate childhood maybe because I had that. I was on to the first noble truth, you know, early.

And so when I actually heard it, when I heard it spoken, those words spoken, my heart just kind of lit up, you know, sense of recognition,

recollection. And as a teacher, I often have the sense that I'm pointing to some love in you that perhaps you've

forgotten something that's dormant where, I don't know, it's like I'm connecting some dots or

reawakening something you once had an intuitive sense of.

And it feels like a kind of homecoming.

A lot of the darma feels like the heart remembering itself returning to some ancestral ground,

so to say, kind of, the kind of the kind of yeah I've always loved this And that sense of homecoming of refuge is so important because we're also doing something

new.

And so the path is both about loving what we've always loved

and it's about learning to love new things, learning to love peace more than

pleasure, space more than stuff,

awareness, more than unconsciousness.

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