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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. You're not going to. So hello and welcome to our meditation session and one of the things that I think meditation is associated with often is calming, becoming calmer, and to only think of it for that purpose is pretty reductionalistic, but becoming calm is certainly extremely valuable.

One of the purposes of becoming calm and one of the means of becoming calm and one of the consequences of becoming calm is the relaxing of becoming calm is the relaxing

of clinging, the relaxing of

the clinging, gripping, of gripping, of strong ways in which we hold on or resist in a way that's stressful for our minds, our

hearts, our body and to emphasize letting go to to emphasize non attachment, non-clinging, in the abstract, sometimes it's hard to understand why or...

But in... why or the value of that. But one of the things we're doing through mindfulness practice

is developing a heightened sensitivity,

a greater awareness

of what it's like physically,

emotionally, mentally, when we're clinging.

To feel the unpleasantness of clinging, to feel the tightness of it, the pain of it even, to feel, to really kind of be

present such a way we feel, of course we want to relax that kind of tension. It's like

holding if someone's really angry and they'll hold their hand in a fist that

they might even know that they're holding their hands in a fist.

And then a friend comes along and sees how tense we are

and just picks up our fist and holds it gently, lovingly.

And then we're, oh, now we realize. oh now we realize and now we can we realize how painful it is to hold

the hand that way and we relax. So part of this practice then is to be in the present moment so we can feel and sense what this living life is like for us so we can see where we are hung up and

to loosen up, let up, release, because we know we feel. And if we don't feel well if we haven't really taken in the

experience of clinging of attachment and see in the moment the unsatisfactory of it, un satisfactoriness of it,

then I suggest you don't let go, you don't relax, but you bring a greater attention

...