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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So welcome to this second talk on the eight worldly winds.

And perhaps it's easy enough to focus on these worldly winds as problems and somehow contend with them as the

problem and we have to do something about them. So these worldly winds are the ways

in which the ways of the world. Get us caught, get us

push us around or trouble us or get us reactive.

And so these, to remind you these are gain and loss, fame and disrepute, fame and disgrace,

praise and blame. and

pleasure and pain.

So today I want to talk about this fame and disgrace, fame and disrepute.

But I don't want to start with the idea that they're out there and problems and how terrible they are and how they cause

problems for us and we should do something about them.

But rather to start with having a reference point within.

And this is the advantage of Buddhist practice.

What we're looking for through Buddhist practice,

Buddhist meditation, is a way of being, a reference point, a state, a quality of being, a

a way of practicing, where we feel this is good,

where we feel this is good, this is right, there's a sense of well-being, there's a sense of peace, a sense of at-homeness, a sense of being settled here and now, a sense of being somehow disentangled from all the preoccupations

normally were caught in. So there's something like that and it's a wide range of possibility exactly what this is.

Maybe it's just a little bit of calmer than usual.

And that's a reference point to understand ourselves better.

And what we understand, we understand how we lose that calm.

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