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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. You're not going to. Hello and one of the Welcome to our meditation session.

And one of the descriptions of meditation practice

is to be undistracted and collected.

So one of the purposes of avoiding distractions is so that our mind or awareness our very sense of

being alive can begin to collect itself here in a composed unified way.

Often the mind, when it's distracted is scattered. It's concerned with other times in other places.

And our emotions can be scattering, can be distracting, can be

fragmenting, can be agitating.

The sensations of our body can be something we're reacting to and wanting and avoiding.

So everything is not collected together.

And this unification,

collectedness that happens in meditation, changes the orientation of the mind, changes how we see ourselves

rather than seeing a particular thing and then defining ourselves by it or judging ourselves by it or pushing against it or pulling away from it, grabbing it, or there is a sense of some

larger hole. a larger

immersion into our totality of our experience.

And while we might be very clearly mindful of the details, it's clear

the details are being seen in a much wider, broader perspective so we're not fixating on anything. Everything

works together as a whole. So this collectedness of mind collectedness of mind and body.

So to assume a meditation posture posture and this assuming the posture is the beginning of collecting ourselves

collecting all the varied ways in which were scattered and preoccupied and

our energies and thoughts are elsewhere and

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