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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So good morning and welcome again and I believe all the buttons and switches and things are in place.

I was away for three weeks at the teaching a three week retreat at our Insight Retreat Center.

And that was quite wonderful and I'm still somewhat with me.

And this week I'll be teaching something that came from that retreat.

So for me it's a little bit of a continuation of the retreat and for

you maybe a little kind of taste of personal states for doing meditation is confidence.

And of course confidence is not easy to come to.

And so maybe a different word from the ancient tradition

might be helpful. and that is certainty to meditate with certainty and the

core thing certainty that the tradition emphasizes is not exactly what you do, but how you do it.

We do our practice with confidence. We do our confidence focusing on

practicing in a way that benefits us, that nourishes us, and to have certainty about the value

of doing that.

As opposed to maybe unconsciously having certainty of the value of

doubting oneself or criticizing oneself or feeling inadequate in some kind of way.

The rumination, the repetition of thoughts and attitudes toward our self that undermine what we're doing can be

quite pervasive and difficult and the idea is to come to a way, finding, understanding the teaching in such a way that even in the simplest way, that no matter what the background, what the past experiences we have, we can have some

confidence in the value of showing up in a clear way for this moment, for this experience,

whatever the past expresses itself in this moment, it's this moment that we want to have confidence

in how we meet it. To meet it in a way that does not undermine ourselves,

does not deflate us.

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