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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

This is to learn how to be centered in the present moment.

And a lot about mindfulness practice is seeing how we're not.

To see how the mind wanders into the future, the mind wanders into the past,

and stays there, or maybe into fantasy, which is in maybe no time.

And so there's a lot of emphasis on the importance.

So just showing up and being here.

And there's a number of reasons for this.

One is if you can, the more you can be here and lessen your thoughts about other times

and other places, the more here can be a place to become calm,

to become peaceful, to become centered, to become connected to yourself in a deeper way.

That's nice. Once you're more connected to yourself, once you're more peaceful and calm, then sometimes we

have to introduce the past and the future again. It would be naive to think that you're never

supposed to think about the past and the future. But first, it helps that one of the functions of meditation is to put us in the present

enough that when we think about the past and the future, we can do it in a wiser way, in a

clearer way.

And I like to use the word in a deeper way than if we're just kind of spinning our thoughts and anxiety and fears and angers

and not going anywhere useful with our thinking.

So in some ways meditation prepares us for living in ordinary life where past and future actually is relevant.

And the...

So, one of the ways that this works in Buddhist practice is that we don't ignore the past,

...