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

Please visit our website at audiodderma.org.

So, excuse me, the theme has been the more assertive, the more and more receptive qualities of mind.

And today I wanted to say something about action and being passive, activity and passivity. The common

question, maybe the most common misunderstanding of equanimity is that it's tantamount to passivity.

But Shenzhen Young, the But Xinjiang Yonge, nice language around this, that equanimity is a relationship with sensory experience, not apathy about the objective conditions of the world,

a relationship to sensory experience, not apathy about the world.

So equanimity now does not equal pastivity in the next moment or tomorrow or whenever.

We are soft animals and we're compulsively trying to optimize experience and consequently

darma teachers emphasize the the passive receptive

receptive dimensions of practice often.

But a lot of that passivity is actually in service of action and a darma life requires a lot of action.

We practice being passive so that we can discern what action buys us and what it costs us.

Retreat, retreat practice, which many of you have done.

Retreat practice is a kind of experiment in passivity. We relinquish almost

all choices,

every minute we're told where to be,

where to be, what to do.

And so we relinquish almost all decision making, we sort of take our hands off all the knobs, right?

And we practice a kind of radical form of passivity, experimenting a kind of

experiment that exactly what this moment offers is enough or maybe we say is right.

And we're no longer kind of in retreat, for example, we're no longer using this moment to predict the trajectory of our day, our week, our life.

...