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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. Hello everyone and welcome and I'm quite happy to be back here after being gone for a week and grateful for David Laurie who've taught for you all

yesterday last week. So I was on a retreat teaching retreat which was quite

lovely at our retreat center in Santa Cruz.

So I think probably most of you know that The Polly word, the Sanskrit word Dukka, which is often translated as suffering, and it gets translated other ways as well.

And one translator, Taniser Abiku, translates it as stress.

And one of the benefits of stress is that even things which are quite

bring a lot of happiness and joy can simultaneously be stressful.

And so the example that's given is a wedding.

Someone getting married is a quite a joyful event but at the same time

it can be stressful and and also stress can apply to small things, small degrees of anxiety, small degrees of resistance,

whereas suffering is a big word and people sometimes associated with the major catastrophes of life.

The word that sometimes I prefer or enjoy enjoy the light as a translation of Dukka is unease.

And that has some of the same benefits as stress. and that is more universal application to feel uneasy. And then the opposite is more universal in application

to feel uneasy.

And then the opposite is ease.

Ease and unease.

To feel easy and feel uneasy about something.

And in meditation, those two can be a wonderful guide

for finding our way in practice and wonderful way of discovering for ourselves the

darma path.

So that'll be the theme for this morning's meditation.

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