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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

So, hello everyone and welcome to this last talk on the aspirations connected to compassion

or the meditation connected to it.

And more deeply than a love and appreciation and devotion to the value of compassion is a love, dedication, devotion to something that's deeper.

I like to believe that is a source of compassion within us.

And one maybe simplistic way of saying it is because it can be so easily misunderstood or so easily seen in a simplistic kind of surface way,

is that the source of genuine, healthy, maybe even healing compassion is being ourselves fully.

And but in some deep way and another way of saying this is to maybe appreciate maybe the profundity of that statement is that it's really letting go completely of our normal senses of self and letting something deeper within us move us, something deeper within us.

The Dharma work through us.

And what is it that is so deep within us that we can trust and allow it to unfold whatever is there in the unfolding?

And one way of saying it in a maybe lestarmic way is that life knows how to bring life forth.

Life knows how to let the fullness of life flow forth in any kind of situation if we can let life flow in a healthy, harmonious way.

So for ourselves to trust that there's some deep movement towards health, not always physical health because we're all dying at some point, but some deep heart health, some deep spiritual health, some deep psychological health that where something wants to be born,

something wants to be healed, something wants to come to homeostasis, something doesn't want to be stressed or in pain or in suffering.

And it's a movement to freedom from suffering for sure.

And to trust this deeper thing that doesn't require us even to generate compassion, to live within a sense of obligated, you have to live a compassionate life.

But rather there's a deeper source, that's what we want to live. And from that comes compassion in the situations that it's appropriate for.

So I offer that in the beginning of this meditation, that one of the values of lessening, quieting, discursive thoughts, being attuned to ourselves in a deeper way than discursive thinking, that there can be something very significant.

Dharma, our heart, life that's kind of wants to come out in a full, harmonious, balanced way.

And we might be far from that because of all the challenges of our lives and complexities of our psychology and all kinds of things, but it's waiting for us.

And so to drop below the discursive mind and begin attuning yourselves or sensing something deeper is one of the possibilities of meditation.

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