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

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Thank you. So welcome to the second talk on samadhi.

This will probably be a longer series.

It is such an important topic in Buddhism, in Buddhist practice,

samadhi or concentration.

And it's part of the key foundation stones, cornerstones for Buddhist practice.

Mindfulness is another one. Ethics, being ethical is a third one.

And kindness and generosity are maybe the fourth.

But it's tremendously valuable and it can lead to a lot of stress and a lot of confusion.

I certainly have tried to develop concentration and meditation and ended up with a headache because of the way in which I was trying to develop samadhi. It was too willful. It was too forceful. It was with a lot of

tension and with a lot of expectation and a lot of degree of conceit.

You know, I'm the one who's going to get concentrated.

So I think of samadhi as an art

and sometimes as an art that we develop,

our craft that we develop over time.

Sometimes I think of it as grace,

that when samadhi arises, it's like a gift that's been given. And I don't necessarily feel responsible for developing samadhi, but I have to put the conditions into place.

So one of the ways of understanding,

the unification of all of who we are as part of samadhi practice,

and why it's so important to discover all the different aspects of who we are,

to do so without any judgments, without any criticisms, without any reactivity to it. But just to discover is to think of ourselves, all the parts of who we are as the new

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