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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

So, hello and welcome to this continuing series on Insight. And for these days, it's having insight,

having a deep understanding, recognition about suffering, a big word. And sometimes an alternative

word that I like is unease. And then when I was younger, I was aware of some

writers who wanted to translate it as dis-ease with a hyphen between the dis and the ease. That somehow there's a deep unease.

The value of this emphasis on uneasiness is that it may be a little bit easier to understand

the broad kind of terrain, broad range of what Buddhism refers to as Dukkah.

There could be an uneasiness with just a, the mildest little thing, and they can be quite big and

large. And, um, and so one of the, really important teachings that we teach and I taught about it yesterday

here at IMC and we taught it here on YouTube is that the idea of the two arrows that if a person is injured by an arrow that's shot at them,

that's painful. There's no doubt about it. And the second arrow is shot at the person,

it's even more painful. And the idea from the Buddha about the simile of the arrows is that the first arrow

is just what life brings us.

We get sick, we get injured, we get old, we die, there's loss, we break a cup, falls on the floor and it breaks.

Maybe we didn't even drop it, it was just somehow the cat pushed it over the edge of the table.

Or there's an earthquake and a precious family heirloom falls and shatters.

And there's all kinds of things.

The first arrow is what life brings us.

And we have sometimes very little control over these first arrows. Maybe we try the best we can

sometimes to prevent difficulties, challenges, things break. But the first arrow is just what comes,

and we're not responsible for it.

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