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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. Good morning and welcome, or good day and welcome to all of you.

And, uh, and, uh... And it's a pleasure to sit here to be prepared to do the offer this teaching.

So one of the common associations

with meditation or meditation with on breathing is that we're supposed to be concentrated on the breath

and stay kind of one pointed just in the breath and not get distracted not wander off from that.

And there is a place for becoming deeply composed, deeply centered on breathing,

but that comes in its due time when we do mindfulness practice.

Mindfulness is first and foremost, knowing, recognizing, being aware of what's happening,

and with an idea that what's happening is a wide field that it's whatever that is

compelling whatever is obvious to us to know it in a qualitatively different way than how we usually know things.

And one of those ways is not to be identified with the experience, not to be defined by it, not to have it reflect

back on us in some way that what we can and can't do or what we're good at or not good at or successful at and not successful at.

But to know it in a light way, a clear way, a full way, but without being attached to what we know,

identified with what we know, resistant to what we know.

So there's a kind of a light touch to the knowing, but light doesn't mean removed.

It means just the right way to recognize what's there without becoming

activated or or reactive to what's happening and maybe the simplest way for some of us to say that is to

know without being identified with what we know, to know without being,

bringing a lot of expectations

and requirements in that knowing, just to know.

So when people think that the point of meditation is to get concentrated on the breath,

...