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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So today we're at the halfway point through the 10 reflections that are central to, can be central to the offering of spiritual care.

And I like to think of it as spiritual care to oneself as much as it is to others.

And to wish ourselves well, in a deep way, allows us to care for ourselves in a deep way,

allows us to care for others. one of the phenomenally important roles of people who

offer spiritual care to others, chaplains and clergy and monastics and Buddhist teachers is to is to convey to others their dignity, their value, their importance, to be dignifiers. What a great role it is to be able to be a dignifier of other people.

I think of that as being an affirmation of others, a deep appreciation of others,

to recognize what is wonderful about others.

And not enough people have been seen in valuable ways have been really seen with respect and care. As we grow up,

the mirroring of people who respect us and care for us is invaluable.

Sometimes people love us or they say they love us, they think they love us,

but the love is so entangled with control, with wanting us to be a certain way, with making us safe and protecting us, that there's no room for us to kind of stand on our own two feet and be fully ourselves in a clear

and full way. The excessive parenting sometimes gets in the way of having room for us to be recognized and seen

as autonomous as being as having agency. And so to dignify others, but we can do that better if we know that we have a sense of our own dignity.

And so dignity is the six of the ten reflections. And maybe you

prefer a different word for the dignity. It could be worth, self worth, self worth, self-worth, self-importance. It could be respect. Maybe there's

other synonyms for this territory as well. I like the word respect a lot myself.

That we have a deep respect for ourselves and I'm, you know, I say often that I like the

word respect because it kind of means in Latin, Latin the origins of it, to see again, to have enough valuing of others and ourselves that we give a second look.

We make space to really get to know somebody, ourselves, other people, the situation.

We respect it, so let's get to know it more. Respect is not the diminishing of ourselves,

it's not as sub- missing ourselves or lowering ourselves in order to hold someone else up.

...