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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. You're going to be. So hello everyone and welcome to our morning meditation.

For some of you it's the afternoon or maybe the evening.

And there is a wonderful saying about the path of meditation,

mindfulness meditation that can be very useful to keep in mind. And that is the saying,

the fastest way to go from point A to point B is to be fully at point A. So of course that doesn't relate it not true everywhere, but it's something very true about the practice of meditation.

It's kind of like a little bit like sometimes trying to fall asleep and the more we try to fall asleep the

harder to fall asleep and there's something about letting go of the effort

to try to go to sleep and just allow oneself

to be as one is that sometimes creates

the better conditions to fall asleep or to relax.

Certainly we can do some relaxation willfully,

but there's also a deeper relaxation

that comes when we just are present with ourselves as we are without adding

anything, without picking anything up, without reacting, and the whole system

physical, mental, emotional system, sometimes can just settle in that process.

And the fastest way to settle is just to be relaxed about how you are.

And so the analogy the Buddha gives is if you stay in the floating in the river, if you're kind of floating in the river and don't grab the branches,

don't try to row upstream and just allow your...

and don't kind of like, you know, sink, but stay floating.

Just be there in the floating without trying to go anywhere, the stream will carry you along.

And maybe carry you along better than if you try to swim.

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