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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

My friends, welcome and happy to be here with you and to greet you at my delight that we have this time together.

And so there is a saying about mindfulness.

That is, mindfulness is easy.

Remembering to do it is difficult.

So the act of mindfulness in of itself is meant to be phenomenally simple.

So simple, it's sometimes hard to trust it.

So simple that it's maybe hard to remember to do it.

And a lot of the practice is remembering and coming back and coming back.

And at some point in the history of Buddhism, the word Sati, translate as mindfulness, was understood to be remembering.

It has related to the word memory or remembering.

So part of it is to remember to do it.

And because it's so difficult to remember, the mind wanders off, it gets caught up and thinking a lot.

Then there's a second practice that we can do that helps us to keep us in the flow of mindfulness.

It's also a way of protecting ourselves.

Mindfulness is meant to be protective so that we're protected from picking up thoughts and impulses and motivations, attitudes, which are harmful for ourselves or harmful for others.

And it protects others, it protects ourselves.

And so this is not picking up.

Sometimes, whenever happens, whenever you notice you're not being clearly mindful in the present moment,

but you're kind of leaning into or getting involved in or picked up in anything else, let go of it.

Or if you see it arising, don't pick it up, let it be.

...