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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

It's nice to see all the greetings on the chat and, uh, sure, there's lots of people who'd rather not chat publicly or don't know.

Don't know how or something.

But I see these wonderful good mornings as kind of representing a large community that we are coming here these weekday mornings.

And it's a very heartwarming, it's inspiring, and it certainly inspires me to come down here and teach.

I love teaching.

And teaching to me feels like an extension of the practice that we do.

So one of the ways that our own practice can be inspiring or can be supported, protected even, is if we don't take it too personally.

The momentum and the mind to define things or refer things back to ourselves in some kind of definition of who we are, or some kind of idea, some kind of feeling that lends itself to such ideas as me, myself, and mine.

And then defining ourselves with these things and lends itself to writing close to all our experience and kind of navigating it as if we're kind of trying to improve the self or defend the self or hide the self or everything is kind of referred to ourselves.

And the idea of progress, the idea of gaining something in practice, can have very much associated with me, myself, and mine.

I have to get something out of this, so why do I do it?

That's a kind of reasonable point of view, but also it too easily brings along a lot of self, a lot of conceit, a lot of kind of self preoccupation,

which is one of the great hindrances to discovering the deep peace that's possible through meditation, the freedom that's possible.

And the idea that we would practice meditation in a certain kind of way, not for ourselves, is confusing and is off-putting for some people.

For some here, don't I count, shouldn't I be taking care of myself?

But there is something very profound about not engaging in this exercise of selfing, of measuring things against some notions of self, judging who we are, what we're doing, trying to get better experiences for ourselves, gathering things to say, gathering experiences, so we have good things to say to our friends.

Trying to make progress in meditation so we can prove ourselves some way.

So this is a delicate thing, this selfing, and of course we want to heal ourselves, of course we want to improve ourselves.

And that's the whole enterprise in Buddhism is to improve ourselves to heal and find freedom, to develop love and compassion.

It turns out that the whole enterprise, the whole momentum of practice, can be a lot easier if we put your rest, the ways in which we take things personally, the ways in which we consider our experiences, what's happening to us, that I'm responsible for this, that I'm making something happen.

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