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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So welcome to this third talk on 10 reflections for a darma life to live in the darma. In fact these ten reflections can be called for living a spiritual life

because they're reflections and orientations for understanding people that are used by people who offer spiritual counseling, chaplaincy to others.

And I find them very useful because they're really basic kind of to our humanity.

So they don't know not the purview of just Buddhism, but in this context of teaching here, I offer them a little bit in the Buddhist context.

So for today and tomorrow, the topic is agency and autonomy and what I associate that with the

positive corollary is a sense of freedom. And so when we are free to have agency, to engage, to engage, to engage, to engage, to act and to do.

And when we have a sense of autonomy in that activity,

that those actions, that comes with a sense of freedom and capacity.

That's critical. comes with a sense of freedom and capacity that's curtailed people suffer a lot.

People are frustrated.

They feel oppressed.

They feel held in check.

They feel boxed in, they feel a sense of hopelessness and even helplessness.

But to give people to allow people, if people discover a sense of agency that they can do, they can make a difference, they can act.

And they're not to health in check. And this relates to the two spiritual kind of needs that people have,

human needs people have that we talked about Monday and Tuesday, meaning and purpose.

That once you have a real sense of what's important for you and the most important

things, most important values, most important

intentions, and important purpose of what you want to do, how you want to live your life,

then to have the ability to actually live that way and not be held in check

by inner forces and ourselves, by our own fears, our resistance, our hesitations, our procrastination,

...