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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. You're not going to. So with this talk today it becomes a third talk on mindfulness of emotions in this 25

part series on introduction to mindfulness.

And one of the challenges of developing mindfulness meditation is the degree to which we identify with

our experience and what identify means that as we define ourselves by it in some way.

Or we are relating to emotions or whatever is happening as if we are what's happening.

So if we have an emotion,

we must be that emotion, that defines who we are.

It represents us in some kind of important way

so that who we are as a person can now be judged

based on what's happening.

And with emotions, this gets very tricky.

And partly because emotions are so changeable. and so conditioned and dependent on so many factors outside of our own lives.

And some of the emotions we experience are conditioned by our society,

that we don't even realize how much we've internalized values of our society,

and that these internalized values then become the basis by which

we judge ourselves, by which we feel frustrated, feel you want thinking things, we like certain things, we don't like other things.

In the wake of liking and not liking, wanting and not walking, wanting, there can be joy and happiness getting what we want there can be anger and frustration not

getting what we want there can be fear and worry about how it will be judged if we

don't live up to certain societal standards.

The phenomenal amount of our emotions are not unique to ourselves,

but are strongly conditioned by the society, the family, the friendships,

...