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 Monday when we begin another five days of talks and I thought

I would finish my life story around relationship to Buddhism last week.

I kind of thought that was plenty of time.

But there's still some more to talk about. So we ended up on Friday with my

decision to go to Burma to follow up with my first experiences with Vipasuna in Thailand.

And then it took a while to get the visa. Burma had been, they didn't know this, but was closed to any foreign or at least

Western travel.

And until about maybe June or so,

and I was able to get there in September.

I was there for eight months at a meditation monastery, and those eight months was the headquarters of what's called

the Mahasi meditation movement.

It was probably the biggest, you know,

Travad and Buddhist meditation movement of the last century.

A monk named Mahasi Saeedow

kind of formulated a way of practicing the Passana that was very effective for many people.

And it spread very quickly.

There's, when I was there, there were maybe 300 centers of this practice in Myanmar and had spread first to Sri Lanka and then to Thailand

and then it came to the United States and one of the kind of initial people who really got it established here was Joseph Goldstein and Jack Cornfield and Sharon Salzburg and Jackleen Schwartz that came and had come out of that scene and in Asia and came and started teaching it here.

So I went to the headquarters, the source of it all, and there was a very large monastery, kind of like a community

college campus with some 5,000 people meditating there at a given time, spread around

the complex and it was to do intensive meditation. We were

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