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

Please visit our website at audiodderma.org.

Good morning. I guess it's still morning. So earlier today I offered this short quote from Bicabody.

He writes,

The mind is like a drunken driver trying to drive down the middle of the lane, no matter how hard the driver tries to

go straight, inevitably they swerve back and forth.

There's so many different ways to kind of look at this quote.

And one way I'd like to look at it now is what is this whole notion of driving down the center of the lane.

Like, what is that and what is its value?

And how do we do it?

And one thing we might say to address this is that equanimity is this quality that allows us to not be pushed around by our experiences.

That is not to always running away from things that are difficult or that

we anticipate will be difficult and not always running towards things that will be pleasant or things that we anticipate will be

will be pleasant and I'm using this expression running but most often it's more

subtle than that this way in which we're organizing our life to

avoid this and have more of that and to go here and oh no I don't want that and it's exhausting it's exhausting but most often

we don't even know that anything else is possible we might think well of

course I'm doing that I'm not a crazy person in the sense that of

course I just want to have a pleasant experience. And if only things out there would behave

themselves, I would be having a pleasant experience.

Yeah, right?

Turns out we don't get to control everything out there.

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