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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So good day to our second talk on mindfulness of grasping, of clinging.

And today there's many synonyms

or many members of this family of attachment and one of them is compulsion and to be

acting on compulsion means that we're not quite in charge and we're not quite

involved with the choices we make and in extreme forms it can be called addiction.

And some people have addictions with their words they speak, with the things that they do,

there's a compulsive quality to them.

And some people lose themselves in the activity they do.

And so the Buddha was addressing this very directly.

And he wanted us to be mindful

of the whole dynamics of how compulsion grasping attachment arises

in us.

And so clinging and grasping are not abstract ideas.

They are physiological events that occur within us.

We can feel, you know, in some ways or other I'd like to propose that generally

when we tense up in our body, we're actually grasping to something.

Maybe it feels necessary if we want to be safe in some situations.

But chronic tension is not about the immediate safety in this situation.

Chronic tension has to do with grasping or clinging or attachment,

sticking to certain kinds of ideas or beliefs or attitudes or feelings that we have.

And so sometimes the compulsion is so strong it can feel like we're stuck to something. You know we have the expression in English

...