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

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So hello and welcome to this penultimate teaching on introduction to

mindfulness meditation and one of the useful distinctions to make is instructions in meditation which are

prescriptive and those that are descriptive and the same instructions can be offered in both ways.

And prescriptive means this is what you do.

And so you apply yourself to do something and descriptive means it

describes what you'll be aware of the first is a little bit more active and some people find it very

helpful to engage actively with meditation. It's kind of like play for them and

or it's they just naturally kind of enter into the world of

doing something and so it's really nice for them to kind of engage in the

instructions like this is what you do and one way to do that is to have

a checklist to go through and you can do the core elements of these five weeks.

Mindfulness of breathing,

mindfulness of body, mindfulness of emotions, mindfulness of thinking.

You can almost kind of go through and do a kind of little bit on each one.

Start with the breathing, then recognize what's happening in the body then emotions and then

thinking or you can do it the other way backwards and some people find you know to just have a

very clear program like that.

Keeps them engaged, keeps them focused, and you know, it becomes, you know,

it becomes, you know, prescriptive of what they do.

Other people find that that's not helpful and other people find

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