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

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Good morning and welcome, welcome.

Especially to those of you who weren't here earlier in the first sit.

So for as the practice note that I sent everyone off to practice with is to just be aware of our posture and whatever we're doing.

With this recognition that our inner life shows up as our outer life, also of course, like how could it be otherwise.

Sometimes we think that what's going on inside of us isn't leaking out, but it does leak out.

Very often it's in the form of our posture, but maybe it's in other ways in our expressions or something like this.

But I want to talk a little bit more about this idea of being aware of the body and the posture as a way of being connected.

The first it's been connected to ourselves.

It's a way that is recognizing what's going on with us and there's a way in which if we pay attention to the physical sensations,

it can interrupt some of the stories that were lost in, some of the narratives that were lost in and help us to see them and to interrupt the momentum of them.

So often we have these repetitious stories that are having a big impact on us that maybe we're not even noticing like how predominant those stories are.

So one way in which connecting with our postures, connecting with our bodies helps us to connect with ourselves,

is it disrupts, I mean like paying attention to the experience of sitting in the pressure of the cushion or the chair against the body,

the feeling of the feet on the ground or on the mat or whether there's a sense of uprightness or collapsedness,

tuning into that does interrupt what's happening in the mind and it's only then that we can actually see what's happening in the mind.

And maybe I talked about like stories and narratives in the mind but maybe there's emotions too.

Maybe there's a way in which our emotions are getting expressed through our bodies and we might not even be tuned into.

Maybe there's a time in which our emotions are feeling this disappointment,

disappointment in what's happening in the world with ourselves, with everything, right? Anything.

There are so many things that don't meet our expectations instead of having disappointment.

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