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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

Good morning. Welcome, welcome, everybody. Today is our last day talking about faculties for

fearlessness.

Fine, fabulous faculties for fun, fearlessness forever for freedom.

How many alliterations is that? If it wrote? Fine. I didn't put the word fine in there probably there I could get that in there somewhere too.

I'm just playing around I like alliterations, but maybe I'll just start with a quick review of what we've talked

about earlier in the week. And as you know, I've been looking at the five faculties and you know, not the conventional way,

not the usual order and not necessarily the usual way that we think about the five faculties. And I've been applying them like, how can it help us with fear? How can it help us that with this pervasive feeling that we often have that, oh, I have to protect myself.

Oh, I'm feeling a little bit threatened. And this fear shows up something like a really subtle this way as well as in

really obvious ways in which there's like some imminent danger as well as maybe just this low great kind of anxiety that

it's not even clear what we're afraid of there's just this sense of not feeling safe. So fear shows up in so many different ways in our lives and it has an impact on us, it's taxing. And not only is it taxing, it can kind of like diminish

our life in terms of we're always trying to avoid greater fear or things that we're not comfortable with.

And not only is it taxing, but it also kind of like it robs us of some freedom, or getting pushed around by this trying to avoid things that are fearful.

And then in these preceding days of this series on the faculties for Fearlessness, I started

off talking about Sati and I emphasized that element of noticing.

So part of Sati is noticing.

And it was a way if we're experiencing fear or we have some anxiety, it can be enormously helpful to notice our environment,

like really mundane things like there's a computer screen, there's a corner of the desk. There's a keyboard. You know, just really mundane things and really help us to get collected and grounded here.

There's also, there's this way that we also can notice the strong sense of no.

We have this way in which we're resisting, we're pushing back.

No, I don't want this experience.

...