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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So hello and we come to the third talk on mindfulness of thinking and kind of stepping back an overview of

this mindfulness practice one of the things that of this

practice. I've learned many important

I've learned many important things by teaching this practice

and one of them I learned was that when I started teaching, the only reference point I had for the practice was really my own experience.

So I thought that was what everyone was experiencing.

And then as I started to teach and talk to more

and more people about their practice,

I realized how, what a wide range of ways people practice,

what a wide range of ways in which people's kind of minds work

or processing work or how they organize

and understand their inner processes and what they call emotions,

what they call thoughts, what they call awareness itself.

And so now as a teacher it isn't that I am hopefully, I mean it's maybe

this is more aspirational than what I actually do but it isn't that I have a clear idea this is what you're supposed to do

but rather I'm trying to offer you different elements different pieces, different ways of practicing in different circumstances, to see if some of it

then you can adapt for yourself. Some of it fits into how your mind

and body work, how your experience of life works, your inner landscape. Because I think eventually all of us become our own teachers.

All of us have to become familiar enough to our own mind and heart and body to know what supports us to find peace, what supports us to find freedom and wisdom.

And so, you know, a lot of this practice that I'm teaching is to get you present enough,

attentive enough so you can learn how it works for you.

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