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

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Thank you. So hello everyone and welcome and

happy to be here

so to happy to be here.

So to continue into our meditation,

there's a wonderful,

important

kind of complementarity between two things to do in meditation,

and that is, on one hand, to be committed to being present.

And to be committed to being present and be committed to being mindful here and now in the present moment to be aware, to stay awake, aware. So a sense of commitment, a sense of choice,

making a decision, yes, this is what I want to do, and I'll stand behind it.

I'll be involved with this. This is what I'll put my life energy into for these minutes.

So that's one hand. The other hand is to have the awareness practice, the mindfulness practice, be calm, be light, be easy going, be maybe even have a sense of happiness or joy as part of it, to feel the goodness,

the wholesomeness of being present. So putting those two together, it's a commitment, which sounds like a heavy-duty word,

a commitment to being light.

Commitment can seem like a word that requires us to bear down and be serious.

But it's a commitment to be easy, to be soft,

to be happy, even if it's accessible, to have a joy.

So it's hard then to make the commitment be heavy and serious and kind of,

there's a lightness and a forgiveness, a willingness to start over again and again, where commitment is not so much

holding the course, but over and over again in a light, happy, engaged way, choosing to start

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