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

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Hello, my friends, and welcome to our meditation.

And I'm feeling pretty appreciative and delighted to be here and to be here in a relatively healthy way after having a short cold, short, maybe flu.

And it feels kind of special to be sitting here.

So the theme for today is, well, this for the Dumber Talk will be appreciative joy.

And so to talk about appreciation and joy briefly, we have this amazing capacity for attention.

And awareness or attention often comes along with our preoccupations,

with our ruminations, with our primary concerns, with our fear. And when it does so,

awareness acts like a magnifying glass. So if we bring our attention to something which we're challenged by,

something we find is difficult or unfortunate,

all these extra stuff that comes with awareness makes it bigger for us and it can loom really big.

And then we miss out on the bigger picture of what's happening.

And meditation is meant to settle the preoccupations, the fears, the biases, the selectivity by which the attention is used to help us see the bigger picture of the moment.

And in doing that, it's helpful to almost counter the tendency,

the negativity bias that many people have, to from time to time, take time to appreciate

all the good that you have, appreciate what is right. Maybe just in this present moment, even if much in your life is difficult,

to be preoccupied with that, for the mind, the heart, to be caught in that all the time

that's not healthy for us. It's good to take a break.

It's good to step away to get a bigger picture, to realize there's more to life than the

challenges we have. And from time to time, it's good to appreciate what is good in life,

what's good, the. What's good?

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