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

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So hello on this...

Welcome to this series of talks on samadhi. And samadhi is not an abstract topic for intellectual

interest only, but it's a topic about ourselves, about how we can be present and engaged in really whatever

we're doing. And it's, with the general focus of the series, is on meditation. And that's,

that connection to samadhi is so strong that sometimes the word samadhi is a substitute for the word meditation.

But really the ability to be fully present, oriented, organized, absorbed, and anything makes anything a subject for samadhi.

And for those of you are going along with this series and wanting to cultivate samadhi in meditation,

it's greatly supported by beginning to take what you're learning about

yourself, about how you can be settled, how you can be oriented, organized, simple, settled,

settled, still, spacious. The way that you can bring that into different activities in your life.

So it's not just something you do in meditation, but something that you're beginning to

spread through your day so that when you come to meditation,

you're already familiar with the territory.

You haven't been out of touch with it for a long time.

And it's more easy to be connected to it.

And I learned this when I was in the monastery,

and I had a very busy, full job in the kitchen

being a cook for the large monastery, and didn't have a lot of time for meditation.

But I started to practice this in the monastery with the activities I did.

And I carried, I had a question that I carried with me.

...