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 these teachings.

This week, the topic is the four noble truths. And after doing the

introduction yesterday, I'll start today with the fourth, the first noble truth, who is the noble truth of

suffering. And also as an introduction to it, the guided meditation that I just did, was on mindfulness of the body.

And the reason for that is that the suffering that they approach to the suffering, to really

know it well, is not so much through the mind, but rather through feeling it experientially here and now in the body,

to know what's happening in the experienced life that we live, not in the imagined life,

not in the projected life into the future, not in the remembered life, but here and now, the

experience life, the lived life of now. And for many of us it's really through the body

that we can feel the greatest sense of aliveness, the greater sense of being connected to life itself

and to ourselves, and the most useful way of being present for the first noble truth, which is

suffering. And so the first noble truth as it's come down to us is a very simple statement it says

there is the noble truth of suffering.

And, you know, that's it.

So that requires a little bit of unpacking.

And first, the word noble.

One translator translated, the ennobling truth of suffering.

That there's a, what it implies that suffering by itself is not ennobling truth of suffering. What it implies that suffering by itself is not ennobling or noble or special.

What's ennobling is the possibility of meeting suffering honestly, seeing it clearly, and finding a path through it

to the other side, to bring suffering to an end. But to go through it is to really know it well, to really understand it well, maybe to see

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