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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So a warm hello

warm hello on this Monday.

Happy to be back after being away for a couple of weeks.

And I had a very nice time going back to my homeland, Norway, birth country, and having wonderful time with my relatives there.

And so I've certainly brought my practice with me,

but it was more ordinary in the sense that I was not reading Buddhist books or

thinking profound Buddhist thoughts or something. It's just living in this present moment

and as free and generously as I could.

And so today I'm following up on that I want to offer for this week something very simple and basic that

maybe we don't have to even think of it as being Buddhist, it's just a wise way of living and it has to do with a little saying that I'm very fond of and I've certainly mentioned it here in this teaching, YouTube teaching a few times. And that's the teaching, the idea that as you

go through your day, especially when things are difficult and confusing and maybe

you don't know exactly what you should be doing or should be saying, that a wonderful guideline is don't make it worse.

Whatever it's happening, don't make the situation worse. So if you're angry, be careful. Don't make it worse, by speaking the angry words so they hurt people or so they

severing and ruin relationships we're in.

So they divide rather than to unify.

If you don't know what to do,

maybe running away makes it worse. Maybe you don't maybe you

don't have to know what to do maybe it's enough just don't make it worse and

sometimes it's so powerful to not make it worse Part of that is that it gives time to the situation

we're in. It may be rather than filling the time or feeling it's being feeling pressure to react or do something now or say something now and

then later regretting it.

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