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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

So, So happy to be here with all of you and to start this new week of teaching.

And what I'd like to do this week is to go back over what I did last week.

I believe that there's much more to say on each of the five topics and given how central these

ideas, these practice approaches are to my teachings.

Maybe it's not a surprise that it's nice for me to be able to

go through them again.

So for today I'd like to keep this instruction work for you what I'm about to say. It might be challenging for some of you for sure to hear this and or many of you will might come up with exceptions that this can't be universal, what I'm going to say.

But probably I would agree with you that that's the case.

But still, there might be a way, a perspective that you could use, that you can find

this beneficial.

It's not universal.

It's not going to be true all the time and it might not address all of your concerns in practice.

But still it might at least for these next few minutes and might be a different

orientation and perspective from which you can learn something. And sometimes we even learn something deep

when it's something doesn't work for us.

So the simple idea is that

Buddhist practice is oriented towards suffering and the end of suffering.

But it's an orientation that one way or the other brings happiness, is oriented towards happiness as much as it's oriented towards suffering, that the very orientation, the very

perspective, the very ability to practice with suffering can be a source of joy, happiness. Be so lucky, so

fortunate to have a practice in spite of whatever suffering we have. Wow, we can practice with

...