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

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So welcome to our meditation, weekday meditations, offered here from Insight Meditation Center.

And today's meditation is part of an ongoing series on samadhi.

And we come to a kind of a turning point now in this series

where we're now going to consider the role of pleasure in different forms as part of samadhi.

So pleasure can take the forms of straight kind of physical pleasure.

You can take the form of joy and happiness, gladness,

and other qualities that come with pleasure.

And so to begin very simply,

and maybe if you can suspend disbelief at your capacity to feel pleasure in meditation

and to be open, to recognize ways, maybe subtle ways, that there can be pleasure,

and there can be pleasure at the same time as pain, and it has a little bit to do with how much or how little we prioritize certain sensations over others.

And certainly pain can be very difficult,

and it can be very, feel like almost a survival instinct to focus on it

and try to manage it.

And of course you should try to manage it the best you can

and certainly never use meditation as a way of injuring yourself

with pain through pain.

But there's also an art to not being reactive to the pain,

not being in the mind fixated on it in some kind of way,

but to be open to the pleasure that's also present.

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