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

Please visit our website at adoredama.org.

So welcome, welcome folks. Happy New Year to you.

It's good to be together, good to practice. So one of the Sangha members sent me,

sent me this yesterday from James Baldwin.

He wrote, if it hurts you, that's not what's important.

Everybody's hurt.

What is important, what corrals you,

what bullwips you, what drives you, torments you, said you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive.

This is all you have to do it with.

You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with

other people's pain.

And insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it.

And then hopefully it works the other way around too.

Insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.

Then you make, oh, 15 years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorces,

God knows how many broken friendships and an exile of one kind or another, some kind of

breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are. That is to say, your first articulation of who you

suspect we all are. This is what the way our pain becomes valuable more than trivial.

And pain is, sitting's not merely about that, but it is about that.

So let us sit and practice and feel our bodies and find a way into our pain and to goodness. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And just know yourself as a

sensory system. What we call our life will only ever be sensory experience. And so we breathe

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