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

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Thank you very much.

Good morning everyone and welcome.

And one of the opportunities and often purposes of Buddhist meditation is to

settle deeply inside of oneself, become calm and settled in order to understand oneself better.

And by understanding oneself better, be able to let go of that which doesn't serve us,

that which gets in the way of further understanding, further clarity.

So I offer an analogy that if the kitchen sink, the faucet is on and the kitchen sink is blocked,

then the water fills and spills over out to the kitchen floor.

And you come home and see the floor wet.

And then you run around the house looking for buckets and sponges.

And maybe eventually you find them and you start mopping up the floor and mopping up the floor and emptying the water and mopping up the floor.

And after a long time of doing that, you're getting tired of all them soaking up and throwing away.

It occurs to you how about just turning off the faucet?

So it's that way in our lives sometimes that we can go around with a lot of challenges,

of all kinds, we can go around with a lot of conflict of all kinds.

And we might be trying to take care of them.

And sometimes we do take care of them.

It's important to care for a lot of things.

But the opportunity and meditation is to sit quietly and no longer objectify our experiences, our life, our challenges ourselves, the world around us,

but drop into a deep subjective experience of what's here.

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