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

Please visit our website at audiodderma.org. Okay.

So, there are probably a lot of different rhythms that run through a practice life, different phases.

And some of those phases are really maybe not discernible.

We, because we can only perceive some small segment of our existence we sort of go to what naturally we can perceive what's conscious, what awareness can

penetrate.

And so we may be over read some of that.

Some aspects, some kind of phases of practice

are maybe not discernible, but we kind of know something is happening,

something's changing, something the tectonic plates of my being are rumbling, but I don't know what is going on.

Some phases are maybe discernible, but we can make sense of them but only after a long period of

retrospective looking back you know and I had a long phase that I was not conscious of being in but it was like

years years and it was only when I kind of like woke up from it that there was like that was there was some kind of

The mind was tinged with some measure of disillusionment maybe on the

slightly nihilistic side somehow and it wasn't, it wasn't kind of, you know, an obvious thing.

And so it only actually registered after the fact.

It's almost like you can't see it

until you have something new to contrast it to.

And too.

And a friend last week said, she's a Darma, a

Darma teacher, you know, close friend.

Actually, just before I went in to teach.

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