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

Please visit our website at audiodderma.org. So this will be the fourth talk on mindfulness of the body.

And an analogy I like to use that is directly connected to the body is the body's

capacity to heal itself from a cut.

You might be in the kitchen, shopping vegetables,

and do a little cut in your finger. your job is to keep the cut clean, to clean it, may be protected with a

bandaid, to keep dirt out of it. But and then the body can as the best circumstances in which to heal itself.

If,

so our job is to kind of get out of the way but to keep it protected.

We can't engineer the healing.

Probably no one knows all the different, all the different physiology of healing a cut that goes on but the body knows

how to do it so there's all this capacity the body has of healing itself, of coming back into

homeyostasis, coming back into peace, calm, that if we can get out of the way and allow for the body's

wisdom and innate capacities to operate, a lot of things can benefit can happen.

I've been by with people who have died

and sometimes it's remarkable to see

people's faces right after they've died because the muscles relax.

And there's a sometime occasionally a deep sense of peace in the face because tension they've been carrying in the facial musculatures have finally released.

We get a little bit the same, kind of at the end of a seven-day retreat, when we see

people's faces after seven days of meditation, so much have softened in the face. And they haven't been focusing on

relaxing the face. It's just the circumstances of the retreat of leaving of

oneself alone very deeply allows something to relax and maybe a little bit

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