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

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Welcome. Welcome.

This first day, it's a Monday on a 7 a.m. here.

It's a Monday on a 7 a.m. here.

What a pleasure it is to be here to join you all.

It's funny that we just call these the 7 a.m.

I don't know, internally at IMC we call them the 7 a.m. but for many of you it's not 7 a.m. but nevertheless.

So this week I wanted to explore working with fear. And specifically to use tools, and I'm going to use

this word tools that we're already familiar with, but maybe emphasize different

aspects of these tools or different views or perspectives on these

tools and maybe combine them in a way that's maybe a novel or a new way or a different way.

And when I was thinking about this this week, I was thinking like,

oh, it's not very exciting or interesting, but I hope it's practical.

Because sometimes what we need are just things to help us

with some of these rough spots or some of the difficulties,

right? Our lives have difficulties. So the tools I want to introduce are the

five faculties. I'm not going to go through the list of them right now because I'll introduce

them each day. I will say that they are

conventionally they're taught in a particular order but I'm going to teach them in

a different order and maybe talk about them in a different way so that it supports specifically about working with fear.

This recognition that when we have fear that we don't really have access to our practice or our wisdom.

...