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

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So, hello everyone and welcome to our meditation session.

And for today, I'm sitting here a little bit appreciating, marveling, all the causes and conditions that bring me here.

But one of them that stands out as I begin this meditation

is that at some point through this Buddhist practice

and I trace it to doing meditation practice.

The practice started to change me.

In the sense I was practiced.

I was because there's two things happening.

There's what we offer the meditation,

and there is what the meditation does to us.

And both are important.

We create certain conditions by how we offer ourselves to the meditation.

And the meditation changes us,

depending on if we allow it to be, if we make ourselves available to that change.

If it's only about us doing something, we're going to miss

one of the most important parts of meditation. But if it's only about we're passive and the

meditation is going to, we're supposed to somehow magically do something for us,

then it won't.

There has to be this reciprocal relationship

between us and the meditation.

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