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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. Hello? Hello, welcome.

and today we'll do the last exploration of mindfulness of emotions.

And I hope that the course of this week,

that I've managed to convey a deep respect for emotions,

that emotions have an important role and place

in our lives, and that learning how to be mindful of them is a tremendous beneficial art.

And I call it an art rather than a technique because it has to do with our inner life, the depths of it, the fullness of it, the range of it,

and something which is constantly shifting and changing and understanding how to be with emotions, how to respect

them, how to learn from them, how to plumb into the depths of their potential is a constantly shifting phenomenon.

We're finding our way, we're discovering, and it's important not to have a simplistic idea that

there's a simple technique for just knowing how to be with emotions. It's, if there is a simplistic idea, it's the idea that we want to be able to show up for them

and discover to have the capacity to be able to be with emotions

without being swamped by them, controlled by them, resisting them, troubled by them, overly succumbing to them, but to be able to see them

clearly so that we can find the wisdom and find freedom that they point to and what's possible.

So in the course of this week one of the things

was the idea of like yesterday of giving lots of space to our emotions.

And so this analogy I've given before

that I think is very powerful

is that sometimes when people think that they're supposed to concentrate on something with

mindfulness, really bore into something, really look at it carefully or study it, it's kind

of like the mind, everything, a lot of mind kind of contracts and

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