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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So hello everyone and welcome to Monday and the first talk in this week's series.

And the topic for this week will be what's commonly

referred to as the eight worldly winds, the eight conditions by which people get caught by circumstances

in the world, the winds that they can change and they blow this way and that way and

were battered around by them. Sometimes the victims of these in the way that because of how much we allow them to take over or impact who we are.

And to introduce these first, I want to say that it's common enough in Buddhism and meditation circles to have some idea of an ideal state to attain, ideal meditation to experience, where we're just kind of

floating in equanimity, we're just kind of feeling so peaceful and at ease and everything seems so nice and that that's the

goal and if we're not there then we're not really meditating properly and you know so we have some fault but we have to kind of

figure out the secret of how to get into this kind of blissful state something

like that. In contrast to that, I think what mature meditation is like,

mature mindfulness is not that we're living in some kind of blissful state all the time.

When the practice really matures,

then there's a keen willingness, a keen interest,

a keen welcoming of taking a deep look at what gets in the way of

mindfulness, what makes mindfulness difficult, what trips us up, where we get attached.

One of the earliest teachings to the Buddha is that what characterizes a wise person is they know how they get caught.

They know, understand and are mindful of their clinging and

and and they're and are mindful of their clinging and their challenges.

So isn't that a wise person knows

how to be peaceful all the time, but the wise person really understands all their difficulties.

And that is the stepping stone to peace.

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