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 no series that I'm giving about my darma life and I left off yesterday with having gone to Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts

for a three-month retreat. And up to that point I've been kind of going

back and forth some between doing Zen practice at the San Francisco Zen Center and

doing Insight practice in Asia in Thailand and Burma and then

the first time I practiced with the Western teachers was a three month retreat in IMS.

And then I went back to Zen Center.

I had been ordained as a Zen priest there, Zen monk, and in the course of kind of the, of growth in that kind of role.

At some point, someone who's ordained there as a priest

has this position of being the called the head student, the head monk of a three month practice period at the monastery.

And it's considered to be kind of like that the transition in the

transition into starting to train to become a Zen teacher and you do your first

darma talks there and so I was invited to have that role and it seemed like a wonderful continuation of

a complete it kind of a completion of my Zen training some people see it as a

completion all your kind of basic training they've been done.

And so you also, you're a little bit the model student, a model practitioner, and so you go to all the meditations and you do all the rituals and the job the head student has is to clean all the bathrooms, the public bathrooms and do the trash and the compost.

I loved it, it was very nice.

So I went back from IMS, I went to do this three month retreat at Tossahara Monastery in the wilderness.

And it was wonderful as a way of continuing what had happened in three months.

Imagine being three months in a long silent retreat and

then not going back into the busyness of the world but being able to go into the kind of

...