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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

Okay. Okay, it's good to say with you.

So we'll continue with this theme of the darma, of other people.

So relationships, maybe we can say are kind of dance of assertion and surrender, of holding power and sharing power, of accepting influence, being affected, being porous enough to be affected.

How much surrender does love demand?

Not everything, but not nothing.

And how comfortable am I surrendering my views acquiescing to the other?

How comfortable am I, how native to my heart does it feel to accept influence?

And alternatively,

how comfortable am I expressing my needs asserting something about my own heart?

Some people kind of feel okay only when they're holding on to power and others feel okay when

they're relinquishing power and it's a little bit like maybe melting and freezing. Some only comfortable as water,

only comfortable as ice.

And we really need flexibility.

We need the ability to melt into the other, but also to freeze and

indivituate. And maybe it seems like Darma is all about melting, melting, melting, melting,

melting, melting, actually Charlotte Jocobec has a very beautiful description of being an ice cube and melting and once you get a little beautiful. sense of, yeah, of freezing as a way of, of, of, of,

of individuating.

So I sometimes have mentioned this exercise I did as a yogi was sitting the retreat at IRC six years ago with Agen Chitto.

And Agun, in his capacity as for a long time as an abbot and as an elder within the

monastic system high forest lineage. He said very explicitly that he found meditation practices were insufficient for

...