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

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This idea of noticing our thinking in the relaxed simple way without having to add anything extra to it.

So this is our third day of working on with the inner critic and I've been describing this inner critic is this interior

you know I'm using this word said personality but you know I'm not a psychologist I'm just using that in the

You know just not in a technical way by any means but it's this way in which there's this voice that's like a constantly putting us down or belittling us and this voice of negativity that's blaming us and

negate us and the strong sense of like you should do this or you should not do that or sometimes it's associated with this real sense of shame, shame for just being who we are or existing and it really has this quality of harshness and creates this attitude, this interior experience of a harshness.

And so, I'm going to link this to thoughts that often this intercratic shows up as thoughts.

They might be the quiet thoughts that maybe we don't see so much, but it's just of

the nature of thoughts that for the most part, most thoughts are

self-referential, that they're these thoughts about me, you know, whatever, you know, there's this implicit sense of that there's this

implicit sense of that there's this me at the center that needs to take care of something or do something or everything is in relation to me or however it might be.

But there's maybe two things to notice about this, that these thoughts about me are always

distorted in some kind of way. We don't think they are. We think they're accurate and

true and precise, but they're distorted.

And it's not until often that we can get away from being lost in thought all the time that we can start to see how

Distorted our thoughts are and so in one way that they're distorted is this idea of, you know, always judging ourselves and putting ourselves down, disparaging ourselves, this inner critic that shows up and for many of us it just feels like normal well of

course there's this inner critic putting us down that's just the way it is. In fact we might not even notice that they're

negative or that they're critical. It just might be so familiar. It just feels like okay

this is what the interior landscape is like and I also want to normalize this isn't true for everybody

For this is a hundred percent anecdotally, but those individuals that I recognize that grew up in the United States,

they often have this inner critic, maybe less so if you grow up outside of the United States.

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