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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So hello and welcome to this fifth and last talk. It's based on the practice of not making it worse That maybe you don't know what else to do,

you don't understand the situation, it seems impossible,

it seems like it's not going well. There's always one thing you make. I hope there's always one thing you can do. You can at least not make it worse. You can restrain yourself from speaking if the speaking

you think is going to make it worse. You can restrain yourself from the

actions you're going to do that if that's going to make it worse.

There's a profound way that, or a very important way that sometimes what's most important important is doing nothing and doing nothing and

doing nothing not to celebrate doing nothing, not to kind of imply that that's the only thing we can ever do or that.

But if we don't know what to do, and all the things we can think that we might do is going to make

the situation worse. Maybe restraint, maybe holding back is the wisest thing we can do. And how to make that wiser so that is not

just only restraint and kind of gritting your teeth or something is to have a practice you can do while you're doing nothing. And so

that's what I've been offering this week and around the acronym worse. So you can wait. And there's something

very profound about waiting. You can get your pull yourself together, get organized, get oriented, kind of let all the different pieces of who you are, your body, your heart, your mind, be gathered together be recognized and be be here. You can relax and maybe even more valuable than relaxing, you can rest. Relax and then

rest in the place of relaxation. Abide. Allow yourself to be there in that place. Don't pick up right away

with your thoughts and activities and doings. Don't relax and then jump up and act.

Now take in and be nourished. and then jump up and act.

Take in and be nourished by the gentler, softer, relax fate.

Rest in it for a while.

And that allows you to sense and to see.

So after going through this process, sense more fully what the situation is,

what's happening in you, and when all your senses are open

to the situation, what do you pick up, what do you tune into that if you're different than if you're only tuning in through your belief systems,

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