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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

So hello and welcome to this next talk on samadhi.

And one of the things to appreciate is samadhi is not a practice per se.

It's a state.

The practices we do of studying the mind, focusing the mind,

being attentive to breathing, letting go of thoughts,

there's a lot of things we might be doing,

but that's not the samadhi. That's the practice to

enter into samadhi. And samadhi is a state. It's actually a variety of different kinds of

states of mind, of heart, of body, of a wholeness that we can experience.

And then it's important to appreciate that the practice, the instructions for meditation,

it can be state-specific.

There's a strong orientation for people to use as their reference point,

me, myself, and mine, how I am now, how this is benefiting me, how it's good for me, or if I like

this or not, if this works for me or not. And there is value in that to some degree,

but we can get stuck in that kind of orientation as well.

And meditation practice is meant to be something

that helps kind of step out of that excessive self-orientation,

self-referencing.

And one way to do that is to appreciate that we have to, when we practice Samadhi,

practice meditation, we have to adjust of our practice our practice according to the states that we're in.

...