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

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So hello and welcome to this continuing series on samadhi.

And now that we're been doing it for a good number of weeks,

I'm now bringing into introducing or more than introducing now, bringing you into the approach stage of samadhi.

And it's approaching a deep immersion, a deep kind of clicking in, a deep kind of settling into just here.

It's almost like a physiological shift in change. Like we become so

fully here that the mind, you know, is clearly at home, clearly subtle, clearly has no inclination

to wonder off. And it's a deeply satisfying immersion into

something wonderful. And so the approach stage is beginning to appreciate this movement,

movement to immersion, movement onward to really being here.

And part of that is to begin recognizing the symptoms of samadhi, the feelings that feel good about

samadhi that are the encouragement or the kind of the symptoms of the very things that

the awareness wants to stay connected to, awareness wants, mindfulness wants to stay here, wants to know this.

It's like standing in the sun on a cold day.

And the system, the body, kind of almost like it wants to stay there,

you know, with it fully facing the sun, so we get the maximum amount of heat on the body.

And so there's something in our whole system that wants to be here

because it's so good, it's so nourishing, it's so good.

And classically, often, there's a lot of attention given to the joy, pleasure that can come as we get into this approach stage.

And it's being kind of absorbed into the pleasure, the joy,

that is kind of the avenue to this deep, deep immersion of samadhi.

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