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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

So welcome to this fourth talk on the road less taken.

And the road less taken, the road that's commonly taken for many people

is one that somehow is related to attachments, to clinging.

And one of the primary attachments that we have is clinging to self and clinging to being alive,

clinging to our identity.

One of the ways that we do that is to select something out of our environment

to be us, something out of our whole

constitution as a human being, to be what's important and

what's valued. What's valued's important and what's valued,

what's valued for us, what's valued for others.

And in doing so, divide up the whole.

When that division, when that sense of identity is created,

formed, made up, based on attachment, that identity

will bring suffering. It will also bring a division of the whole. We no longer live in the

whole of our experience, but we're prioritizing a small subsection of it.

And one of the ways that that is physically experienced is through tension, through tightness in the body and the muscles.

And it's very interesting to see how when there's a preoccupation in the mind,

around anxiety, for example, or fear, or anger, or desire, the impact it has on the tension in the muscles in the body.

It can be sometimes quite large, the shoulders are held tight, the chest is kind of contracted. It can be in the hands.

Sometimes the hands are fidgeting a lot and moving. Sometimes it's in the jaw, tight. Sometimes it's in

...