Meditation is not about whether it's pleasant or unpleasant. It's about how aware we are,

how mindful we are. Welcome to the Joseph Goldstein Insight Hour. This podcast is an expression of our shared interest in self-discovery.

Join Joseph as he shares his deep knowledge of the path of mindfulness.

If you are interested in supporting this podcast, please go to be

here now network.com slash Joseph.

The why and how of practice? Why do people do meditation practice?

Why in the busyness of our lives and in the midst of a very fast-paced culture,

why do we come and take time to be on a silent retreat?

Each of us may start with a variety of different motivations.

We may have come here for quite different reasons.

For some people, maybe it's to reduce stress in your lives.

You know, just to ease the pressures or cool out from the pressures of one's life.

You know and in our culture in general this meditation as stress reduction has gotten quite popular.

Maybe people come to practice because of wanting to understand a little bit more about the nature of the mind or about

the nature of suffering, either emotional or psychological and a way of understanding a way of coming

out of that, relieving it.

We might be inspired by the possibility of a radical transformation of understanding who we are,

really coming to the deepest understanding of what life and death are all about.

And in the Buddhist context, this radical transformation of understanding is called Enlightenment or Awakening or The Highest Peace.

Now for many of us, we may come with an initial motivation but very often as our practice deepens our very motivation may change because as our practice deepens as our practice deepens and our understanding grows, we begin to open up to

new possibilities to see the possibility of things that we had not considered before. But for all of us,

regardless of what our initial motivation may be, we all start really in the same place.

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