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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. Hello from Redwood City at the Insight Meditation Center and so I'm particularly happy to be here today.

I was, this morning as I turned my attention to the topic of today,

I started to feel a kind of smile and delight and joy. So I'm happiness just from turning my mind in that

direction and that's because the topic for today is happiness and happiness is a word that I see as an umbrella term for a whole

family of states of well-being that we can experience and it's an important reference point for

Buddhist practice. On one hand clearly Buddhism is an honest meeting of our suffering, an honest assessment

and consideration turning our attention towards suffering to be very honest and truthful about its presence,

but not so we can suffer more,

but so we can somehow resolve that suffering

or dissolve that suffering or solve that

suffering in some way so that the mind can open to happiness. I'd like to think of the there's a natural capacity

we have for happiness that is often obscured by our clinging and our holding and that as we let go, as we let

go of clinging, grasping, that the mind's simple capacity to feel delight and joy becomes

increasingly important.

And so, of course, it's difficult to sometimes be happy

and we have many challenges in our lives. I don't want to, excuse me for a moment,

I don't want to in any kind of way diminish the difficulty

belittle the difficulty we have with the challenges of our lives.

And at the same time, I don't want to limit

our capacity to recognize well-being.

And these can coexist.

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