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

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And so last week, talking about fear, I talked about sometimes, I guess I could have given this an example in the guided

meditation, but sometimes there's just a slight fear when in our meditation we find

ourselves in some unfamiliar territory.

This usually happens with longer meditation sessions or maybe on a retreat. But there might be like, oh,

what is that? I haven't had that experience before. And there's a number of different meditative

experiences we might have. And the instructions were, in that occasion, when there's often a sense

of spaciousness and ease and fear that's due to the unfamiliarity with

it, can we orient towards some of the spaciousness that's there? Now, this is not an everyday

experience that we're having fear and spaciousness at the same time.

But this is a unique opportunity, if that does arise in meditation, to just notice how we

want to just turn towards the fear and fix it and make it go away and fiddle with it as much

as we can and just really dive in.

And a little bit I talked about last week is,

can we recognize, yes, the fear is there?

We're not denying it.

We're not repressing it.

We're not pretending.

But inclining the mind towards any sense of openness or spaciousness or ease that's

there.

And then last week I also talked about a little bit what we did in the guided meditation.

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