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

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So, one of the important things that we learn

through doing this practice of meditation is we learn how not to give in or be hijacked by our reactivity.

And that's a fascinating journey coming into this practice to discover what reactivity is,

how reactive our minds, our hearts are.

And learn how not to be trapped by them or caught by it or pushed around by them.

And when my first kind of encounter with this was when I started practicing Zen,

that was a benefit.

And so in Zen, you sit down to meditate and usually back then it was pretty much that everyone was expected to sit cross-legged.

And that was not easy for my body.

It was pretty painful.

I was stiff and knees were not cooperating and things.

And so, and then I was restless and I never sat still for 40 minutes in my life.

And so what was fascinating was to see how much I wanted to move.

How the impulse to move or to scratch if I had niche or if I had the slightest little, you know,

ache and some knee or something.

The instinct was to immediately suggest, just like if you're sitting on a couch maybe just hanging out with friends talking,

there's probably a lot of shifting and moving of the body posture without even thinking about it,

just to constantly shift and move and make yourself more comfortable and all that.

So that's what I was used to.

But the 40 minutes of still, I mean, what I got to see was how much I was operating on a certain kind of reactivity.

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