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 Welcome.

So for this meditation today, maybe I'll do a little less guiding, but more setting a context

for the meditation.

community, sanga, spiritual friendship,

is very important, very supportive for Buddhist practice. And when I was living about three years in a Buddhist monastery,

it was a very important time in my life and the practice was important and I could

not have done it without the support of the community, being community with people. I wouldn't say I didn't have good friends in the

monastery but I had a village. I had a regular social contact with people who were nice and and it was a wonderful place to be and so I had this wonderful balance between spiritual friendship and

ability to be kind of also at the same time not having a social life complicate my life

allowed me to settle into the practice. Having my teachers, and I was a little bit slow to understand, but in retrospect I've understood

how important my early teachers were and their

support, their encouragement was invaluable for me to continue. And to this day I feel very much that the support part of the fuel, part of the

inspiration for my practice is the spiritual community communities that I'm part of and

I am C and now for the last almost over four years here on YouTube with all of you coming here. There's something very

valuable that the Association, the Connection, the shared practice that we have.

And this goes back.

I feel very much that sometimes I sit down to meditate and I appreciate that there are

thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people at this very moment engaged in Buddhist practice and meditation around the globe, maybe more.

And that we had, there's a shared community for this practice here and now.

We don't know each other necessarily, but the fact that so many people are practicing and that is important for me and then if you go back

through time my many teachers my teachers their teachers and that there's been people doing this practice for over 2,000 years.

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