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

Please visit our website at audiodderma.org.

So to offer you a few words on the practice, a very simple approach to this to a wise life, to mindfulness practice,

is encapsulated in four words, don't make it worse.

Whatever you're doing, don't make it worse.

Don't make it worse. And so to say make it better might be too high a standard.

To live up to but at least don't make it worse. And so if you're you know in a conversation with someone, you know, track yourself enough to know whether what you're about to say is this going to make this situation worse? You know, somebody can be irritated or angry

with you, or are you going to say something mean or something kind of deflating for everyone?

You know, what's what you're doing don't make it worse and but then in

meditation you know we have all kinds some of us have all kinds of inner challenges when we meditate

Challenges to being present and and so whatever you're tracking yourself to degree which you're tracking yourself, the degree which you're tracking yourself, see if you have some choice to not continue doing what makes the situation worse.

So it could be that you're sitting here fantasizing about, I don't know, how you're going to give

your boss a piece of your mind when you get back to work. And you look at that and

you say, wait a minute, the more I think about this, I'm just making it worse for myself.

I'm working myself up into a fury and I keep reliving all the insults I've had and I came

to IMC to relax but I'm actually going on the wrong direction here. So you can't necessarily make yourself

feel better automatically, but maybe you could stop making it worse. Maybe you can

somehow step away or don't participate so much in those kinds of thoughts about your boss or whatever it might be.

Or it might be that you don't like what your mind is doing or your body is doing as you meditate and so you get

angry and judgmental or feel shame or embarrassment and since you're tracking enough so if I'm going to feel shame or embarrassment. And since you're tracking enough,

so if I get involved with those movements of the mind,

I'm going to feel worse.

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