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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So again, good day and welcome to all of you on this day of giving thanks and

and um... And one of the things I am very grateful for is my meditation practice,

this practice of being present and I feel like it's been a I do feel it's a gift

Not only is the practice a gift I feel like I feel very fortunate to have received this gift in my lifetime,

and I feel very fortunate for what seems to move through or arise as I sit and it leads to a kind of deep gratitude to life, to being alive, to breathing, to all that makes it possible for me to be alive and safe enough and quiet enough to be able

to sit in meditation and to open the mind, open the heart, metaphorically at least when I'm sitting,

open my hands, be open-handed in this world,

open-hearted, open-minded. And it just seems like such a fortuitous, fortunate thing to have this ability,

this capacity, to this opportunity to do this kind of practice.

So when I bow at the end of a sitting, it's often for me an expression of gratitude because I learned

early on that it was good to express it. It was almost like, you know, it'd be hard not to.

Some emotions we feel come to fulfillment when they are expressed in some form.

And I feel gratitude is one of those that need some expression, some movement

that goes maybe beyond oneself.

Gratitude for me is an experience that

there's something beyond my personal ideas of self, my ideas of my agency, ideas of my, all kinds of things that are operating here, maybe when Buddhism we call the

darma and to sit and open to this wider kind of, some people might call it transpersonal, some people might call it the deepest, most

intimate place that's non-personal.

Because, and whether it's trans-personal

or deeper than personal.

Whatever it is, it gives birth to gratitude.

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