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

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Okay. Okay, so that's been good, good to be with you this week.

Appreciated our time. So for me getting getting into practice I think I saw Jack Cornfield's path with heart early in practice. And what I remember is maybe a chapter or something like that where he suggested that at the end of our life

one question will loom large did I love well.

And it was like that just felt very true and it was sort of like how do I do that?

What can I do? Tell me what to do?

And it's a beautiful question and fair enough to wonder what do I do.

But fair enough to wonder what do I do. But it strikes me that we've maybe over-emphasized choice and choice

in Darma, and sometimes under-emphasize

the training dimensions.

So training dimensions. So we often, you know, talk about how Darma allows us to make wise choices.

We come to a kind of fork in the road, we choose the healthy,

the wholesome rather than the unwholesome. We respond rather than we react. We choose letting go rather than holding on.

And fair enough, fair enough.

But it somehow doesn't really capture the flavor of practice for me. And it strikes me that some of the emphasis on choice is about our preference for

control and doingness and a kind of instant gratification of just giving the agitated energy a channel into which to flow.

Right? Because we talk about being, being this, something like this.

But a lot of what Darma teachers include something like

say is like do these things.

do these things.

And whenever I say something like, okay, here are four things to do.

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