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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. Hello everyone and happy to have you here as I return from being gone for a week and

to be able to share this time together and to begin kind of right to begin kind of right away,

I want to say that meditation is often associated with becoming calm and relaxed.

And that when people sometimes show up to meditate they might feel agitated,

they might feel all kinds of difficult emotions or spinning minds.

And the idea that meditation is an antidote for that and that we're trying to

calm that down or settle something and become more peaceful and that's all fine and

it's actually part of meditation.

But there comes a time when what we want to do in meditation

is not calm ourselves down, is not make things pleasant for ourselves,

but rather learn to be present,

quantumously present, wisely present,

non-reactively present for how things are difficult.

If we always need to change how we are and change how we feel,

we're not really finding the full freedom that meditation, mindfulness meditation can provide us. If we always need to make ourselves feel better,

then we're still caught and probably still attached to something and thereby setting up the

conditions for us to get caught again. If we're reacting towards our tension and only calming down,

then we don't really learning how to become wise, non-reactive,

kind of peace, may be peaceful about being not peaceful.

So we've been doing these 7 a.m.

many of us for over three and 1 half years now. So I'd like to suggest that we don't use

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