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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

It's good to sit with you.

So over the 12 years or so,

over the 12 years or so that I've been teaching full time, I've received a lot of feedback and I used to be featured in a kind of video course that, you know, maybe five, 10,000 people would take each year.

And to complete the course, the learning management system required people to give detailed feedback.

So they could not get course credit unless they gave detailed feedback on the trainers, which I was one. And this is if you if you think you truly understand

a nata read the feedback from 10,000 strangers.

You know, so even still I've always kind of valued it, even if sometimes it's jangly or something.

But I valued it because it illuminates, you know, the response to feedback

illuminates the architecture of self-view, the kind of sacred cows of self.

And we usually think like, okay, I'll take in the feedback

that's right and I'll refuse the feedback that's off base and that's

fair enough but I think from a Buddhist perspective it's like regardless of whether the feedback is right or wrong.

If it highlights defensiveness, it's a value.

It's a value.

Because wherever there is defensiveness,

there's clinging.

And clinging can always lead us to harming self and other.

So I say all of that as a kind of introduction to a little piece of feedback that's been lodged

deep, deep in my brain. maybe like medulla oblongata deep, kind of like the part that regulates

breathing.

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