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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

Good morning. Welcome.

So, welcome to this 7am community, the YouTube meditation community.

I feel it's delightful to come together this way and the repetition of doing this for such a long time makes it feel like kind of a homecoming to sit down here and to be with you all.

So, thank you.

And so, one of the metaphors that is used sometimes for meditation is listening.

And in fact, listening is sometimes considered to be a profound spiritual practice.

Especially if we listen to what is not a sound, we listen to our hearts, listen to what's inside, listen to the silence that's here.

Many years ago, someone told me that I think it's the Catholic Order, the Benedictines.

Their kind of description of their way of life begins with a Latin word ascolta, meaning listen.

And the disciples of the Buddha, who were called the direct disciples who listened to him, were called the listeners, sabakas.

But to sit in meditation and think of their listening, the reason why it's such a useful metaphor or idea is that with listening we have to listen well.

We have to suspend our judgment, suspend our commentary, suspend our projections onto a situation.

We have something that has to become quiet to listen well.

And if mindfulness is a kind of listening to the moment with closer eyes, it's often listening to ourselves in some deep way,

what do we have to suspend to listen well?

What are the commentaries, what's the noise of the mind that we quiet, willingly quiet, wisely quiet,

because we are interested in, we put great value in what gets revealed when we are not having commentary, not preoccupied in thoughts and stories past and future.

And to have this stance of listening also, we don't interfere with the sounds that come our way.

I mean, you could go and turn up or down the volume on this broadcast, if you would like.

But there's something about sounds that come that, in and of themselves, they come without blocking the sound or attacking the sound.

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