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

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Good morning. It's nice to see you all and it's nice to be here. Some of you may know me. I'm D Clark, I teach her on Monday nights, and here I am on a Sunday morning.

And some of you may be listening to Gills 7 a.m. and you may know that I substitute for him a couple of weeks ago when I talked a little bit about poetry and practice.

And I like to like extend a little bit what I spoke about then.

And if you didn't hear that, it's perfectly fine too.

But what I'd like to talk about is the way that practice meets our life.

And I know certainly for me at the beginning there was a clear

distinction between practice and life. I would listen to darma talks or read darma books and they really touched me and felt like something really powerful was there.

But then I would just go off and do my life, my regular life, right? Whatever that was.

But as the more I read Darma books, listen to Dartmouth talks, and meditated.

The more I started to see that these two things kind of like practice and life

started to come closer and closer together and the distinction

between them started to blur and things that I thought were you know like these

conceptual understandings that I thought were, you know, like these conceptual understandings that I had,

started to just show up in the way that I was being in the world.

And I've told this story a number of times but a really clear example for me is this idea of behaving ethically. I thought of myself as an ethical person I wasn't going around stealing

things or harming people but I was doing an awful lot of little white lies.

Just to, you know, when I looked at it to make myself look better or not to hurt feelings of other people and so when I started to like take seriously well what is this thing

about the Buddhist life talking about you know behaving ethically and this wish to not harm others and I said okay I'm gonna stop

these little white lies

such as oh, I'm sorry I'm late, the traffic was really bad. The traffic wasn't bad, I just was disorganized. And then when I realized that I, okay I'm going to have to say why I'm

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