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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. Hello everyone and welcome for this is a five week

is a five week introduction to mindfulness meditation

series I'm doing on these 7 a.m.

and so with that in mind the theme for this week will be mindfulness of emotions.

And for the first meditation related to this, I'd like to keep it really simple and

start with an analogy that if you are going to cross a field, which I did recently, that is muddy, maybe marshy, maybe easy to get deeply stuck in the mud and it's a slow

going. It's sucked into the mud and it to pull your feet out again and over

again and it's a hard going. But then you discover that right there in the field there are stepping stones.

And if you just step from one stepping stone to another,

there's no getting stuck in the mud, and it's easy going. And the mud is still there. In fact, now the field looks more beautiful and has its own dignity, its own value, but you're not getting stuck in it.

And so it's nice to walk and observe and be with it and stepping from and Emotions are very important for mindfulness meditation, for the point of view of

mindfulness. There's no emotion which is wrong to have and there's no condemning of an

emotion but what we're trying to do is not have some judgment about an emotion, but trying not to get stuck in the mud, to get stuck in it.

And it's possible to get stuck both in pleasant emotions and unpleasant ones.

And the pleasant ones we don't recognize often that we're stuck, that we're kind of,

because it's so nice.

But the idea in mindfulness meditation is to learn how to respect the dignity and value and circumstances of every emotion we have while walking on the stepping stones,

while walking in a place where we don't get stuck, where it's firm and dry and

very supportive and we don't get pulled into it.

So I would like to offer one way that maybe you can do this and maybe experiment.

And that is that in this meditation to, if it works for you to let breathing be the center of the

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