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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

So I return here, too, after being away for a couple of weeks with many

of the Ventus events happening in this country and around the world.

And the earthquakes, the fire in Maui, just the tragedy of it, it keeps growing

and more we learn about it.

And for anybody who lives in Hawaii and in Maui,

I send my condolences and my love and people who are maybe here in California

dealing with the flooding in Southern California and where they're in our hearts.

So I hope that this practice that we do is really for the benefit of this world.

And that the way in which it benefits ourselves makes it possible for us to offer the right attention,

support, love, compassion, care for this world around us.

And maybe it's just the very local world of a few people around us.

Maybe it's broader worlds, but that this practice does orient us to live in a way

that doesn't add to the harm of the world, but actually adds to ways in which we can benefit this world.

So in the last few months when I've been teaching here, I've been teaching about compassion.

And I kind of wondered if I had been finished with this series, but in thinking about it this last couple of weeks,

I wanted to do one more week, maybe a concluding week on compassion.

It felt important to actually spend a whole week on the joy of compassion, the happiness of compassion.

And perhaps for those you've been listening to this series on compassion,

that as you start to understanding the ecology of all the different pieces of compassion and how they come together,

that we can understand and appreciate that there is the potential for our compassionate relationship to the world

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