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

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Good morning or good day or I'm always saying good morning for me it's morning here

but whatever time it is and wherever you are warm welcome. It's such a delight to practice together to be part of community.

For those of you who don't know me, I'm Diana Clerk.

If you're watching this on YouTube,

you might know that I'm on YouTube

on Monday nights as part of IMC and oh maybe you've seen

me before on your screen and I'm going to I want to introduce this idea of the series this week about stories and like our stories we tell, in some ways we might say that humans are

storytelling creatures, that we use language and narratives to make sense of our experiences, you know, to like have them to

organize them in a way that makes sense to us and you might even say that telling stories is just a fundamental

activity that people in all cultures, you know, maybe all through time have been doing as long as there's been language there's

been storytelling but you don't need to tell you this of course right anybody who has

sat down to meditate just like we did might notice how the mind is like getting caught up and telling stories or these entertaining thoughts or fantasies or maybe the stories are about planning, okay, I'm going to do this,

and then this other thing is going to happen

because that other thing is going to happen,

I'm going to feel more safe or whatever it might be,

whatever it might be.

It's a lot of storytelling is happening. I like to look at this this week, different aspects of it, as well as including different stories. So I like to start us off with this a teaching story that is from

Jack Cornfield's book, Path with Heart. You know I say this I'm pretty sure it's a path with heart. I say this, I'm pretty sure it's a path with heart. I do know it's one of

Jack Cornfield's books. And he tells this story about a poison tree, a tree that has a poisonous fruit.

And he tells the story that when first discovering this tree that has this poison fruit, people often are like afraid and they want to avoid this tree and

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