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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So good morning everyone and welcome and I'm happy, grateful for Nicky and Ying who taught here while I was away.

I was back in the country of my birth, Norway, for memorial services

from both my parents. And wonderful to be back there and see relatives I haven't seen for a long time and I'm happy to be here.

So, um... So for this meditation today I'd like to evoke an unfortunate term that many people live with

and that is time pressure, living under the pressure of time, not enough time.

There's not enough time to do what we have to do with our responsibilities or there's so many things to do what we have to do with responsibilities or there's so many things to do.

And we live sometimes under the burden of time, the pressure of time.

And if instead of calling a pressure which kind of implies maybe

that it's kind of something coming from outside of us we call it tension, time tension.

We carry in us tension related to time.

That's the way that a big part of how we relate to time is a construct of our own mind

independent of any philosophical ideas of what time is the way that we relate to the time aspect of life has a lot to do with our constructs, our beliefs, our orientations, our

plans, our expectations, our to-do lists,

all kinds of things.

And when we sit down to meditate, one of the opportunities is to step out of time or to enter into a sacred time, a time, time that there is lots of time,

spacious time, a time that is not something that we have to be tense around or be pressured by

to live in expectations when it will be over.

Oh, these are things we overlap. when it'll be over.

All these are things we overlay on top of this moment to moment life that we live,

on top of now.

And to, from time to time, like when we sit down to meditate or when we have

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