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

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So, once upon a time, someone asked, when's a good time to be mindful?

And the answer was, when it's the best alternative, when it's the best option.

One of the phenomena that happens as we start practicing mindfulness,

we start discovering that it's often the best option and it becomes the better option the more we practice it.

And part of the reason for that is as we're practicing mindfulness, we start seeing what our mind stream is doing.

And sometimes, occasionally, our mind stream is not that high quality.

It's not doing something that might even be harmful, it might even be a drag, what goes on in there, the topics, the concerns, the attitudes.

And that's also circumstances. Mindfulness is a better option.

And what mindfulness does is it kind of interrupts the freedom of our unhealthy mind stream,

some just perpetuating themselves freely, which if we're not mindful, they can do.

And if the unhealthy mind's ruminations and thoughts and ideas go freely,

they actually reinforce each themselves to become stronger and stronger.

But to be mindful is considered to always be helpful, always be a wholesome, beneficial thing for the mind to do.

Because it's a way of, to some degree, stepping out of that mind stream and seeing it.

And the more clarity, which you see, oh, that's not a cool way of thinking.

The more clarity that is, without judgment and criticism, just, oh, look at that, that's not cool.

We're interrupting that mind stream to some degree. We're stepping out of it for a moment.

And then, as we do so, you ask the question, what's the best time to be mindful?

I think it's right now, because it's the better alternatives, the better option.

Sometimes we're thinking about something that's not necessarily harmful for us or for others.

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