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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. Hello and welcome to this third talk on mindfulness of the body and one of the important areas of mindfulness

practice is relaxation or calming. The language of the Buddha may be the word

he uses closer to our English word calming if we think of it as a physical calming.

And as many people associate meditation with relaxation, with calming,

a softening, a gentling of our body and mind and art, a significant thing begins happening if we have any degree of relaxation or

calmness that's more than how we live our life normally.

And that is that the relaxation of the body becomes a reference point to understand ourselves better.

And what I mean by this is that if we're more relaxed than we usually are,

then we have a chance to notice when we return to how we usually are because we're

tensing up, because we're becoming a little bit more agitated.

And to be able to have a physical reference point for this

is then we can see more closely.

We're more able to notice when we're engaged in some activity, some way of being, which is

tensing. We can take us see what's going on better. For one thing we just simply see we're becoming more

tense and then we can ask the question do we want to go along with that or do we

want to come back to the place we just were?

And then one definition of meditation that I've heard

is set yourself at ease and notice what takes away that ease. So let

yourself be calm and notice what takes away that calm. Let your body be somewhat

relaxed. Doesn't that be dramatic, just a little bit more than you usually are. And then

notice what takes you away from that. And if you do that, then you can ask the question, should I continue doing this? Is this necessary?

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