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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Good morning. Good morning. Welcome. Welcome. And even if it's not morning where you are,

just happy to be here practicing with you all.

You can see from the title that I was posted there on YouTube that I'm going to do a week

of poetry here.

I've done this a few times before.

There's a way in which I like to do poetry as a, to point to, there's a different way in which

we can engage with the teachings than the memorization of the lists or trying to remember

all the sequence of practices or something that we've learned.

That's tremendously valuable and I love the list.

I teach them sometimes, but I think it's a trap.

If we think that the only way to practice is that we have to figure something out

and we have to understand it all and get it just right, the less right,

or something like that.

As an alternative to that, poetry points to something that's in the heart, something that we

feel our way into or open up to or allow ourselves to experience and know in a different kind of

way than all the lists and the instructions.

We need both, I would say.

And it's so easy when doing a Dermatalk to feel like, here are the instructions.

Here's something to do.

It's extremely useful, not the only way to practice.

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