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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So hello on this Monday and I'm sitting here in Redwood City at the Insight Meditation Center and delighted to be in this kind of time together.

So for the I thought over the weekend about different themes to do for this week

for the 7 a.m. YouTube and we've been doing this now for a long time many we can say

years now since the beginning of the pandemic and I've done many themes and this weekend in

thinking about what to do I couldn't I thought about different things but none of them really had a spark for me.

None of them really were something that I could feel, felt like I could come here and embody or feel a deep heart connection to.

So I think what I'd like to do is to fall back on a certain default that might be interesting for you.

Some of you have been listening to me here for a long time

and do something maybe uncharacteristic.

And that is to talk a little bit about myself.

Maybe some of you'd like to know more about me.

Mostly here in the 7 a.m. sitting I talk about the darma and occasionally I'll mention something

autobiographical but maybe some of you don't know much about me and might be

interesting to hear a little bit. And to make it interesting for me,

I think that maybe talk a little bit about the background

of my life in a way that brought me to practice and brought me here to IMCE and even here now teaching with all of you.

So I hope that that's interesting enough to hear this and

feel a little bit apologetic that it's not giving you some specific

darma topic to chew on and maybe that'll come out of as I tell

talk you a little bit about my life.

So, um, so. So I came to the darma first time, probably first contact with it was when I was probably

...