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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

Good morning and good day, good afternoon, good evening.

Welcome to our meditation time together.

I'm imagining that what it would look like if there were somehow lines looking from space,

looking down at the earth and seeing lines drawn between all of us,

a line from each of us to all the others,

and what a marvelous web or net they would create.

And maybe it's a line of goodwill, friendliness, care.

So thank you for being here.

One way of understanding meditation is that it can be a continual act of appreciating oneself.

And appreciating oneself and sometimes is in short supply.

And so we practice it.

We practice it not to override or to pretend or to have some kind of polyannish attitude towards ourselves.

But we find a way to appreciate ourselves even knowing that we have maybe faults,

knowing we have challenges, knowing we have things that maybe are hard to appreciate.

But to not define ourselves by our faults or what's hard to appreciate,

to not limit how we relate to ourselves based on those,

maybe even because of those, it's so important to expand the vision

to see how we can respect our basic humanity,

just like we would respect to everybody else.

And in that respect to have a fundamental appreciation for our value,

...