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

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So, again, welcome everyone to our YouTube community and I'm delighted to be back to be sitting with all of you and it's something very,

certainly kind of personal and heartwarming to come down to IMC here in the morning, getting ready

at home and coming down here and sitting down here in my

meditation posture to be with you and to share the darma and to participate with you in the darma.

So one of the, for me, remarkable aspects of mindfulness, awareness practice is the time or the transition from awareness practices,

mindfulness being, maybe we can call it simply mindfulness,

simply awareness, to having a clear sense that mindfulness and love are just about synonymous,

just about synonymous, maybe not exactly in all their dimensions,

but they can't be teased apart.

I don't know, maybe they can be teased apart but in doing this practice I came to a point where

they arose together almost as if they are the same almost as if they coexist, like, maybe like right and left hands coming

together to bow. Or maybe like, like,

just, comes the mind is petting a cat and is feeling affection for the cat and the petting and the affection the contact the awareness of the cat the participation

with the cat is the same. So to sit with love, to sit with love as a reference point.

And there are many flavors of Buddhist love,

and the word can be very vague, just using it by itself.

And one of the flavors is friendliness.

A basic goodwill, a basic attitude of meeting our experience, meeting others with friendship or goodwill, well wishing. And to be able to meet anyone,

we meet anyone at all with a very basic, the basic love of stepping towards them with goodwill, with a friendship, a friendliness.

It doesn't have to be that we like someone,

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